Twitter API – get tweets with specific id

You can access specific tweets by their id with the statuses/show/:id API route. Most Python Twitter libraries follow the exact same patterns, or offer ‘friendly’ names for the methods.

For example, Twython offers several show_* methods, including Twython.show_status() that lets you load specific tweets:

CONSUMER_KEY = "<consumer key>"
CONSUMER_SECRET = "<consumer secret>"
OAUTH_TOKEN = "<application key>"
OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET = "<application secret"
twitter = Twython(
    CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET,
    OAUTH_TOKEN, OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET)

tweet = twitter.show_status(id=id_of_tweet)
print(tweet['text'])

and the returned dictionary follows the Tweet object definition given by the API.

The tweepy library uses tweepy.get_status():

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
auth.set_access_token(OAUTH_TOKEN, OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET)
api = tweepy.API(auth)

tweet = api.get_status(id_of_tweet)
print(tweet.text)

where it returns a slightly richer object, but the attributes on it again reflect the published API.