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Using twython I am trying to retrieve list of all of the followers of a particular id which has more than 40k followers. But I am running into below error "Twitter API returned a 429 (Too many requests) rate limit exceeded. How to over come this issue?

Below is the snippet, I am printing user name and time zone information.

next_cursor = -1

 while(next_cursor):

  search = twitter.get_followers_list(screen_name='ndtvgadgets',cursor=next_cursor)

    for result in search['users']:
        time_zone =result['time_zone'] if result['time_zone'] != None else "N/A"
        print result["name"].encode('utf-8')+ ' '+time_zone.encode('utf-8')
    next_cursor = search["next_cursor"]
BJC
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1 Answers1

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Change the search line to:

search = twitter.get_followers_list(screen_name='ndtvgadgets',count=200,cursor=next_cursor)

Then import the time module and insert time.sleep(60) between each API call.

It'll take ages for a user with 41K followers (around three and a half hours for the ndtvgadgets account), but it should work. With the count increased to 200 (the maximum) you're effectively requesting 200 results every minute. If there are other API calls in your script in addition to twitter.get_followers_list you might want to pad the sleep time a little or insert a sleep call after each one.

Ben
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  • Hey Ben,Thanks for the reply. I wonder how simplymeasured.com folks are able to retrive this information fairly quick, i wonder if there is a better way to do it. – BJC Oct 19 '13 at 04:47
  • There may be a way to handle it through the streaming API, but I haven't looked at that much so I can't be sure. Also, I should mention that I haven't really tested time delays as described here so there may be some issues with maintaining the response through the REST API over a protracted period. – Ben Oct 20 '13 at 03:36