Sending messages to Twitter

Question

I am trying to implement a function in Python to send messges to my Twitter account. The lasst lines of function are:

params=urllib.parse.urlencode({'status':msg})
resp=urllib.request.urlopen('http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json',params)
resp.read()

And I got this message: TypeError: POST data should be bytes, an iterable of bytes, or a file object. It cannot be of type str.

I have seen similar Q&A and I can not find the error. Actually I took the function from a textbook and revised many times..

I will be grateful if someone can help me

Answer 1

Rather than write your own using urllib, use the TwitterAPI library for something like this. For common uses like Twitter, you'll find that often someone else has already developed a thorough implementation, and using such things can allow you to move on to doing your own code without worrying about the basic functionality of, in case, how to talk to Twitter.

You can install TwitterAPI by doing a simple:

pip install TwitterAPI

Once installed, all you have to do is use the following (adapted from the TwitterAPI README) and add your own code to supply the actual content of the tweets:

from TwitterAPI import TwitterAPI

consumer_key = <your own key>
consumer_secret = <your own secret>
access_token_key = <your own token key>
access_token_secret = <your own token secret>

api = TwitterAPI(consumer_key, consumer_secret, access_token_key, access_token_secret)

msg = 'This is a tweet!'

request = api.request('statuses/update', {'status': msg})
print(request.status_code)

The documentation for this library is pretty clear, and has much more than just this simple use case.

Also, in the future, if you do other work that involves internet requests, I'd highly recommend you look at the requests library instead of urllib. It will save you many headaches:

http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/

You can install requests by:

pip install requests

Happy New Year!