ActiveState Code

Recipe 576594: Backup/download your tweets or anyone's tweets.

A quick script that lets you download all of your tweets and write them to a text file.

Python 
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#!/usr/bin/python

import time
from urllib2 import urlopen
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

# Replace USERNAME with your twitter username
url = u'http://twitter.com/USERNAME?page=%s'
tweets_file = open('tweets', 'w')

for x in range(10*10000):
    f = urlopen(url % x)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(f.read())
    f.close()
    tweets = soup.findAll('span', {'class': 'entry-content'})
    if len(tweets) == 0:
        break
    [tweets_file.write(x.renderContents() + '\n') for x in tweets]
    # being nice to twitter's servers
    time.sleep(5)

tweets_file.close()

Discussion

Loops through all of your public timeline pages, grabs the individual tweets, and throws them into a text file.

Comments

  1. 1. At 12:03 p.m. on 12 jan 2009, Caleb Herbert said:

    Cool! I'm gonna keep that in my library for when I just have BSD or a console-only system. This is great.

  2. 2. At 10:46 a.m. on 10 sep 2009, Alex said:

    ImportError: No module named BeautifulSoup

    I've never worked with BeautifulSoup before. I googled their site and downloaded the zip they have, but I don't know what I should be doing with it to be able to make this work.

  3. 3. At 6:37 p.m. on 22 sep 2009, Zach Seifts (the author) said:

    Alex: You should be able to install it with easy_install or pip. BeautifulSoup is in the cheese shop.

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