CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythontwittertweepy
user1056824
user1056824

Reputation: 503

Get All Follower IDs in Twitter by Tweepy

Is it possible to get the full follower list of an account who has more than one million followers, like McDonald's?

I use Tweepy and follow the code:

c = tweepy.Cursor(api.followers_ids, id = 'McDonalds')
ids = []
for page in c.pages():
     ids.append(page)

I also try this:

for id in c.items():
    ids.append(id)

But I always got the 'Rate limit exceeded' error and there were only 5000 follower ids.

Upvotes: 30

Views: 49976

Answers (5)

mhc
mhc

Reputation: 299

Tweepy's "get_follower_ids()" uses https://api.twitter.com/1.1/followers/ids.json endpoint. This endpoint has a rate limit (15 requests per 15 min). You are getting the 'Rate limit exceeded' error, cause you are crossing that threshold.

Instead of manually putting the sleep in your code you can use wait_on_rate_limit=True when creating the Tweepy API object.

Moreover, the endpoint has an optional parameter count which specifies the number of users to return per page. The Twitter API documentation does not says anything about its default value. Its maximum value is 5000. To get the most ids per request explicitly set it to the maximum. So that you need fewer requests.

Here is my code for getting all the followers' ids:

auth = tweepy.OAuth1UserHandler(consumer_key = '', consumer_secret = '', 
    access_token= '', access_token_secret= '') 
api = tweepy.API(auth, wait_on_rate_limit=True)
account_id = 71026122 # instead of account_id you can also use screen_name
follower_ids = []
for page in tweepy.Cursor(api.get_follower_ids, user_id = account_id, count = 5000).pages():
    follower_ids.extend(page)

Upvotes: 0

zana saedpanah
zana saedpanah

Reputation: 334

I use this code and it works for a large number of followers : there are two functions one for saving followers id after every sleep period and another one to get the list : it is a little missy but I hope to be useful. 

def save_followers_status(filename,foloowersid):
    path='//content//drive//My Drive//Colab Notebooks//twitter//'+filename
    if not (os.path.isfile(path+'_followers_status.csv')):
      with open(path+'_followers_status.csv', 'wb') as csvfile:
        filewriter = csv.writer(csvfile, delimiter=',')


    if len(foloowersid)>0:
        print("save followers status of ", filename)
        file = path + '_followers_status.csv'
        # https: // stackoverflow.com / questions / 3348460 / csv - file - written -with-python - has - blank - lines - between - each - row
        with open(file, mode='a', newline='') as csv_file:
            writer = csv.writer(csv_file, delimiter=',')
            for row in foloowersid:
                writer.writerow(np.array(row))
            csv_file.closed

def get_followers_id(person):
    foloowersid = []
    count=0

    influencer=api.get_user( screen_name=person)
    influencer_id=influencer.id
    number_of_followers=influencer.followers_count
    print("number of followers count : ",number_of_followers,'\n','user id : ',influencer_id)
    status = tweepy.Cursor(api.followers_ids, screen_name=person, tweet_mode="extended").items()
    for i in range(0,number_of_followers):
        try:
            user=next(status)
            foloowersid.append([user])
            count += 1
        except tweepy.TweepError:
            print('error limite of twiter sleep for 15 min')
            timestamp = time.strftime("%d.%m.%Y %H:%M:%S", time.localtime())
            print(timestamp)
            if len(foloowersid)>0 :
                print('the number get until this time :', count,'all folloers count is : ',number_of_followers)
                foloowersid = np.array(str(foloowersid))
                save_followers_status(person, foloowersid)
                foloowersid = []
            time.sleep(15*60)
            next(status)
        except :
            print('end of foloowers ', count, 'all followers count is : ', number_of_followers)
            foloowersid = np.array(str(foloowersid))
            save_followers_status(person, foloowersid)      
            foloowersid = []
    save_followers_status(person, foloowersid)
    # foloowersid = np.array(map(str,foloowersid))
    return foloowersid

Upvotes: 5

irritable_phd_syndrome
irritable_phd_syndrome

Reputation: 5077

The answer from alecxe is good, however no one has referred to the docs. The correct information and explanation to answer the question lives in the Twitter API documentation. From the documentation :

Results are given in groups of 5,000 user IDs and multiple “pages” of results can be navigated through using the next_cursor value in subsequent requests.

Upvotes: 3

CodingMatters
CodingMatters

Reputation: 1431

Use the rate limiting arguments when making the connection. The api will self control within the rate limit.

The sleep pause is not bad, I use that to simulate a human and to spread out activity over a time frame with the api rate limiting as a final control.

api = tweepy.API(auth, wait_on_rate_limit=True, wait_on_rate_limit_notify=True, compression=True)

also add try/except to capture and control errors.

example code https://github.com/aspiringguru/twitterDataAnalyse/blob/master/sample_rate_limit_w_cursor.py

I put my keys in an external file to make management easier.

https://github.com/aspiringguru/twitterDataAnalyse/blob/master/keys.py

Upvotes: 28

alecxe
alecxe

Reputation: 474161

In order to avoid rate limit, you can/should wait before the next follower page request. Looks hacky, but works:

import time
import tweepy

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(..., ...)
auth.set_access_token(..., ...)

api = tweepy.API(auth)

ids = []
for page in tweepy.Cursor(api.followers_ids, screen_name="McDonalds").pages():
    ids.extend(page)
    time.sleep(60)

print len(ids)

Hope that helps.

Upvotes: 49

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