Question

I am writing a simple Tweepy application for fun, but am really limited to how many API calls I have (anywhere between 150 and 350). So to account for this I am looking for ways to cut calls. Tweepy has a cursor system built in. Eg:

# Iterate through all of the authenticated user's friends
for follower in tweepy.Cursor(api.followers).items():
    follower.follow()

For those who are familiar with this library. Would the above example be more or less efficient than simply…

for follower in api.followers_ids():
    api.follow(follower)

Are there any other advantages apart from simplicity to use the Cursor method over an iterative method?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If I remember correctly from my use of tweepy, a Cursor object automatically paginates over n many elements… For instance, if there are 10,000 results, and Twitter returns (say) 200 at a time, then using the Cursor will return all 10,000 but will have to make a call to keep retrieving the next ones.

OTOH, api.followers_ids() only returns the first “page” of results, so maybe the first 100 or whatever.