Avoid Twitter API limitation with Tweepy

Question

I saw in some question on Stack Exchange that the limitation can be a function of the number of requests per 15 minutes and depends also on the complexity of the algorithm, except that this is not a complex one.

So I use this code:

import tweepy
import sqlite3
import time

db = sqlite3.connect('data/MyDB.db')

# Get a cursor object
cursor = db.cursor()
cursor.execute('''CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS MyTable(id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, name TEXT, geo TEXT, image TEXT, source TEXT, timestamp TEXT, text TEXT, rt INTEGER)''')
db.commit()

consumer_key = ""
consumer_secret = ""
key = ""
secret = ""

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
auth.set_access_token(key, secret)

api = tweepy.API(auth)

search = "#MyHashtag"

for tweet in tweepy.Cursor(api.search,
                           q=search,
                           include_entities=True).items():
    while True:
        try:
            cursor.execute('''INSERT INTO MyTable(name, geo, image, source, timestamp, text, rt) VALUES(?,?,?,?,?,?,?)''',(tweet.user.screen_name, str(tweet.geo), tweet.user.profile_image_url, tweet.source, tweet.created_at, tweet.text, tweet.retweet_count))
        except tweepy.TweepError:
                time.sleep(60 * 15)
                continue
        break
db.commit()
db.close()

I always get the Twitter limitation error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "stream.py", line 25, in <module>
    include_entities=True).items():
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/tweepy/cursor.py", line 153, in next
    self.current_page = self.page_iterator.next()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/tweepy/cursor.py", line 98, in next
    data = self.method(max_id = max_id, *self.args, **self.kargs)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/tweepy/binder.py", line 200, in _call
    return method.execute()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/tweepy/binder.py", line 176, in execute
    raise TweepError(error_msg, resp)
tweepy.error.TweepError: [{'message': 'Rate limit exceeded', 'code': 88}]

Answer 1

The problem is that your try: except: block is in the wrong place. Inserting data into the database will never raise a TweepError - it's iterating over Cursor.items() that will. I would suggest refactoring your code to call the next method of Cursor.items() in an infinite loop. That call should be placed in the try: except: block, as it can raise an error.

Here's (roughly) what the code should look like:

# above omitted for brevity
c = tweepy.Cursor(api.search,
                       q=search,
                       include_entities=True).items()
while True:
    try:
        tweet = c.next()
        # Insert into db
    except tweepy.TweepError:
        time.sleep(60 * 15)
        continue
    except StopIteration:
        break

This works because when Tweepy raises a TweepError, it hasn't updated any of the cursor data. The next time it makes the request, it will use the same parameters as the request which triggered the rate limit, effectively repeating it until it goes though.