How to check for image use in tweets in Tweepy

Question

I have written code to extract tweets from a list of users [handles]. I am writing the information to a .txt file called "results".

with open("results", "w") as fp:

for handle in handles:
    print("Analyzing tweets from " + handle + "...")

    user = api.get_user(id=handle)

    fp.write("Handle: " + handle + "\n")
    fp.write("Name: " + user.name + "\n")
    fp.write("Description: " + str(user.description.encode(sys.stdout.encoding, errors='replace')) + "\n")
    fp.write("Followers: " + str(user.followers_count) + "\n")
    fp.write("Following: " + str(user.friends_count) + "\n")

    tweet_counter = 0
    prosocial_tweets_count = 0
    regular_tweets_count = 0

    all_tweets = []
    social_tweets_len = []
    regular_tweets_len = []
    social_tweets_valence = []
    regular_tweets_valence = []

    regular_attachments = 0
    social_attachments = 0

    for tweet in tweepy.Cursor(api.user_timeline, id=user.id).items():
        #control for timeline
        dt = tweet.created_at
        if dt > date_until:
            continue
        if dt < date_from:
            break # XXX: I hope it's OK to break here
        if include_retweets == "no" and tweet.text.startswith("RT"):
            continue
        if include_replies == "no" and tweet.in_reply_to_user_id:
            continue
        tweet_counter += 1

        for word in vocabulary:
            if word in tweet.text.lower():
                #increase count of pro social tweets
                prosocial_tweets_count += 1
                #clean the tweet for valence analysis
                clean = TextBlob(tweet.text.lower())
                #calculate valence
                valence = clean.sentiment.polarity
                #append the valence to a list 
                social_tweets_valence.append(valence)
                #append the length of the tweet to a list
                social_tweets_len.append(len(tweet.text))

                #check if there is an attachment
                counting = tweet.text.lower()
                counting_attachments = counting.count(" https://t.co/")
                social_attachments = social_attachments + counting_attachments

                #write date
                fp.write("  * " + str(dt) + "\n")
                #write the tweet
                fp.write("    " + str(tweet.text.encode(sys.stdout.encoding, errors='replace')) + "\n")
                #write the length of the tweet
                fp.write("    Length of tweet " + str(len(tweet.text)) + "\n")
                #write the valence of the tweet
                fp.write("    Tweet valance " + str(valence) + "\n")
                #write the retweets of the tweet
                fp.write("    Retweets count: " + str(tweet.retweet_count) + "\n")
                #write the likes of the tweet
                fp.write("    Likes count: " + str(tweet.favorite_count) + "\n")
                # Report each tweet only once whenever it contains more than one prosocial words
                break

            else:
                #this code runs if the tweet is not prosocial
                regular_tweets_count += 1
                clean = TextBlob(tweet.text.lower())
                valence = clean.sentiment.polarity

                counting = tweet.text.lower()
                counting_attachments = counting.count(" https://t.co/")
                regular_attachments = regular_attachments + counting_attachments

                regular_tweets_valence.append(valence)
                regular_tweets_len.append(len(tweet.text))

    attachments = regular_attachments + social_attachments

I was wondering whether anyone knows of any nice way to check if the tweets contains images or videos. I would also like to create a list of average use of images and videos per user.

Answer 1

If you look at This thread, you will see that all media in a tweet are actually stored in tweet.entities['media'].

Therefore if you want to know if a given tweet (in the format tweepy.models.Status used by tweepy) contains a picture, you could try this:

try:
    print(True in [medium['type'] == 'photo' for medium in tweet.entities['media']])
except:
    print("No picture in this tweet")

I hope it helps.