Question

I want to create a function which grabs every users latest tweet from a specific group. So, if a user is in the ‘authors’ group, I want to grab their latest tweet and then finally cache the result for the day so we only do the crazy leg work once.

    def latest_tweets(self):
    g = Group.objects.get(name='author')
    users = []
    for u in g.user_set.all():
        acc = u.get_profile().twitter_account
        users.append('http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/'+acc+'.rss')
    return users

Is where I am at so far, but I’m at a complete loose end as to how I parse the RSS to get there latest tweet. Can anyone help me out here? If there is a better way to do this, any suggestions are welcome! I’m sure someone will suggest using django-twitter or other such libraries, but I’d like to do this manually if possible.

Cheers

Answer 1

Rss can be parsed by any xml parser. I’ve used the built-in module htmllib before for a different task and found it easy to deal with. If all you’re doing is rss parsing though, I’d recommend feedparser. I haven’t used it before, but it seems pretty straight forward.