I have a list of tweet ids for which I would like to download their text content. Is there any easy solution to do this, preferably through a Python script? I had a look at other libraries like Tweepy and things don't appear to work so simple, and downloading them manually is out of the question since my list is very long.
You can access specific tweets by their id with the statuses/show/:id API route. Most Python Twitter libraries follow the exact same patterns, or offer 'friendly' names for the methods.
For example, Twython offers several show_* methods, including Twython.show_status() that lets you load specific tweets:
CONSUMER_KEY = "<consumer key>"
CONSUMER_SECRET = "<consumer secret>"
OAUTH_TOKEN = "<application key>"
OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET = "<application secret"
twitter = Twython(
CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET,
OAUTH_TOKEN, OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET)
tweet = twitter.show_status(id=id_of_tweet)
print(tweet['text'])
and the returned dictionary follows the Tweet object definition given by the API.
The tweepy library uses tweepy.get_status():
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
auth.set_access_token(OAUTH_TOKEN, OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET)
api = tweepy.API(auth)
tweet = api.get_status(id_of_tweet)
print(tweet.text)
where it returns a slightly richer object, but the attributes on it again reflect the published API.