Question

I’ve been looking for a way to update my Twitter status from a Python client. As this client only needs to access one Twitter account, it should be possible to do this with a pre-generated oauth_token and secret, according to http://dev.twitter.com/pages/oauth_single_token

However the sample code does not seem to work, I’m getting ‘could not authenticate you’ or ‘incorrect signature’..

As there are a bunch of different python-twitter library out there (and not all of them are up-to-date) I’d really appreciate if anybody could point me a library that’s currently working for POST requests, or post some sample code!

Update:
I’ve tried Pavel’s solution, and it works as long as the new message is only one word long, but as soon as it contains spaces, i get this error:

status = api.PostUpdate('hello world')
Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
      File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\python_twitter\twitter.py", line 2459, in PostUpdate
        self._CheckForTwitterError(data)
      File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\python_twitter\twitter.py", line 3394, in _CheckForTwitterErro
    r
        raise TwitterError(data['error'])
    python_twitter.twitter.TwitterError: Incorrect signature

If however the update is just one word, it works:

status = api.PostUpdate('helloworld')
{'status': 'helloworld'}

Any idea why this might be happening?

Thanks a lot in advance,

Hoff

Answer 1

I’ve been able to solve this problem using another library – so I’ll post my solution here for reference:

import tweepy
# http://dev.twitter.com/apps/myappid
CONSUMER_KEY = 'my consumer key'
CONSUMER_SECRET = 'my consumer secret'
# http://dev.twitter.com/apps/myappid/my_token
ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY= 'my access token key'
ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET= 'my access token secret'

def tweet(status):
    '''
    updates the status of my twitter account
    requires tweepy (https://github.com/joshthecoder/tweepy)
    '''
    if len(status) > 140:
        raise Exception('status message is too long!')
    auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
    auth.set_access_token(ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY, ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET)
    api = tweepy.API(auth)
    result = api.update_status(status)
    return result