tweepy get tweets between two dates

I have the following code in Python:

import tweepy

consumer_key = "..."
consumer_secret = "..."

access_token = "..."
access_token_secret = "..."

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)

start_date = datetime.datetime(2018, 1, 19, 12, 00, 00)
end_date = datetime.datetime(2018, 1, 19, 13, 00, 00)

api = tweepy.API(auth)

for tweet in tweepy.Cursor(api.user_timeline, screen_name="@IBM", since=start_date, until=end_date).items():
    print("ID TWEET: " + str(tweet.id))

Is there a way to get tweets between start_date and end_date, by modifying the cursor with tweepy?

I have already tried to use the since= and until= parameters, but they have not worked.

Thank you in advance.

Answers:

Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Method 1

First of all the Twitter API does not allow to search by time. Trivially, what you can do is fetching tweets and looking at their timestamps afterwards in Python, but that is highly inefficient.

You can do that by the following code snippet.

consumerKey = "CONSUMER_KEY"
consumerSecret = "CONSUMER_SECRET"
accessToken = "ACCESS_TOKEN"
accessTokenSecret = "ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET"

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumerKey, consumerSecret)
auth.set_access_token(accessToken, accessTokenSecret)

api = tweepy.API(auth)

username = sys.argv[1]
startDate = datetime.datetime(2011, 6, 1, 0, 0, 0)
endDate =   datetime.datetime(2012, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0)

tweets = []
tmpTweets = api.user_timeline(username)
for tweet in tmpTweets:
    if tweet.created_at < endDate and tweet.created_at > startDate:
        tweets.append(tweet)

while (tmpTweets[-1].created_at > startDate):
    tmpTweets = api.user_timeline(username, max_id = tmpTweets[-1].id)
    for tweet in tmpTweets:
        if tweet.created_at < endDate and tweet.created_at > startDate:
            tweets.append(tweet)

Although highly inefficient. It works, can helped me in creating my own bot.

Method 2

I’ve just used until (optional operator) and it seems to work pretty well. I used it like this:

tweets = tw.Cursor(api.search,
                   q=search_words,
                   lang="en",
                   since=date_since,
                   until=date_until,
                   result_type="recent"
                   ).items(2)

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0