Twitter search API, Python & Json parsing issue

Question

I can use the python Json library to extract information from this address

http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=%23damn&result_type=recent&rpp=1&filter:retweets

and most of the time using

j =json.loads(urllib.urlopen('http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=%23damn&result_type=recent&rpp=1&filter:retweets').read())

text = j['results'][0]['text']
id = j['results'][0]['id']

I can extract the text and ID from the results and pprint them. I am requesting JSON every 15 seconds so I don't get blocked by twitter's limit.

Every so often I encounter this.

   {u'completed_in': 0.021,
 u'max_id': 313306991827238912L,
 u'max_id_str': u'313306991827238912',
 u'next_page': u'?page=2&max_id=313306991827238912&q=%23damn&rpp=1&result_type=recent',
 u'page': 1,
 u'query': u'%23damn',
 u'refresh_url': u'?since_id=313306991827238912&q=%23damn&result_type=recent',
 u'results': [],
 u'results_per_page': 1,
 u'since_id': 0,
 u'since_id_str': u'0'}

Nothing appears to be contained inside of the results field. This causes the following error.

  Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\Home\Desktop\test.py", line 32, in <module>
    text = j['results'][0]['text']
IndexError: list index out of range

Which in turn closes the Python Command Line. I have considered placing a 'while' loop to make sure the results field is full before proceeding but I feel this could send to many requests and get the script locked out of twitter.

Have you encountered this problem? Do you know how to overcome it?

why not wait for some time, if the results field is empty? check out http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4152969/genrate-timer-in-python — Balachander Ramachandran, Mar 17 '13 at 15:34
I'll try that now. Sometimes it takes an hour or two before a dodgy result comes in. — Hooperstu, Mar 17 '13 at 15:39

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 17 '13 at 16:13

0

I would either throw in an if statement before calling the results or a try, I've noticed in my time using web API's that the results aren't always reliable, better to be on the safe side

answered Mar 17 '13 at 16:13

Matt Camilli

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Twitter search API, Python & Json parsing issue

1 Answers1