Question

I am new to Python and I’ve been trying to connect to Twitter’s public data streams as a practice project. I’ve gotten this far:

>>> import urllib2
>>> url = urllib2.urlopen("https://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/sample.json")
Trackback...(omitted)
urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 401: Unauthorized

The 401 Error was expected, however I’m at a loss as to how to move forwards. I’m currently reading the Twitter Authentication API Docs, they recommend third party libraries, which I could do but I want to avoid because I really want to learn what is going on. I think you have to put the OAuth data in the header? Should I use add_header()?

Answer 1

The link you posted requires HTTP auth:

>>> from urllib2 import *
>>> password_mgr = HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()
>>> url = "https://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/sample.json"
>>> password_mgr.add_password(None, url, 'USERNAME', 'PASSWORD')
             #worked with my real twitter credentials ^ 
>>> h = HTTPBasicAuthHandler(password_mgr)
>>> opener = build_opener(h)
>>> page = opener.open(url)
>>> page.getcode()
200

See this