Question

I’m writing a twitter bot using tweepy that will search for mentions to it and then implement actions based on the text in the tweet. Eventually I want to run it every few minutes via cron. I’m a python beginner, so forgive my ignorance.

My problem is preventing duplicates. I have a loop that goes through and tests whether a tweet is new by checking whether its id is greater than the previous tweet. However, I can’t work out a way of initializing this variable, and then saving changes to it at the end of the loop.

Here is my current (broken) code:

import sys
import tweepy

## OAuth keys go here.

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
auth.set_access_token(ACCESS_KEY, ACCESS_SECRET)
api = tweepy.API(auth)

def ask_bot():
    old_id = 0
    for tweet in api.mentions():
        if tweet.id > old_id:
            print "@%s: %s" % (tweet.author.screen_name, tweet.text)
            old_id = tweet.id + 1
        else:
            pass      

The desired behaviour at the end is for the loop to only print tweets that haven’t been printed before.

Answer 1

I would just make a list of IDs that have been printed. Then you would simply check if the ID you’re trying to print is already in the printed list. If it is, do nothing. If it isn’t, print it and add it to the list.

In other words:

import sys
import tweepy

## OAuth keys go here.

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
auth.set_access_token(ACCESS_KEY, ACCESS_SECRET)
api = tweepy.API(auth)

printed_ids = []

def ask_bot():
    old_id = 0
    for tweet in api.mentions():
        if tweet.id not in printed_ids:
            print "@%s: %s" % (tweet.author.screen_name, tweet.text)
            printed_ids.append(tweet.id)
        else:
            pass