Tweepy Python Tuple Error no attribute encode

Question

I am using tweepy and python to gather tweets based on certain keywords and then writing those status updates (tweets) to a CSV file. I do not consider myself a programmer and I am really lost on this.

Here is the Error:

> Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./combined-tweepy.py", line 58, in <module>
    sapi.filter(track=[topics])
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/tweepy/streaming.py", line 286, in filter
    encoded_track = [s.encode(encoding) for s in track]
AttributeError: 'tuple' object has no attribute 'encode'

Here is the script:

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
import re
import tweepy
import codecs
import datetime

consumer_key = ""
consumer_secret = ""
access_key = ""
access_secret = ""

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
auth.set_access_token(access_key, access_secret)
api = tweepy.API(auth)

# Create a list of topics
with open('termList.txt', 'r') as f:
  topics = [line.strip() for line in f]

stamp = datetime.datetime.now().strftime('%Y-%m-%d-%H%M%S')
topicFile = open(stamp + '.csv', 'w+')
sapi = tweepy.streaming.Stream(auth, CustomStreamListener(topicFile))
sapi.filter(track=[topics])

class CustomStreamListener(tweepy.StreamListener):
    def __init__(self, output_file, api=None):
        super(CustomStreamListener, self).__init__()
        self.num_tweets = 0
        self.output_file = output_file

    def on_status(self, status):
        ### Writes one tweet per line in the CSV file
        cleaned = status.text.replace('\'','').replace('&','').replace('>','').replace(',','').replace("\n",'')
        self.num_tweets = self.num_tweets + 1
        if self.num_tweets < 500:
            self.output_file.write(status.user.location.encode("UTF-8") + ',' + cleaned.encode("UTF-8") + "\n")
            print ("capturing tweet from list")
            # print status.user.location
            return True
        else:
            return False
            sys.exit("terminating")

    def on_error(self, status_code):
        print >> sys.stderr, 'Encountered error with status code:', status_code
        return True # Don't kill the stream

    def on_timeout(self):
        print >> sys.stderr, 'Timeout...'
        return True #Don't kill the stream

f.close()

Answer 1

Here's the definition of a tuple according to Python's documentation. It seems like one of the words in topics is a tuple.

I see other little errors. First, the way you wrote your code, you should call your functions after you have defined them. For example, these two lines

sapi = tweepy.streaming.Stream(auth, CustomStreamListener(topicFile))
sapi.filter(track=[topics])

should come after you have defined all the functions in

class CustomStreamListener(tweepy.StreamListener):

Also, there's no need to put topics in braces

sapi.filter(track=[topics])

since it's already a list according to this line

topics = [line.strip() for line in f]

Can you show us the content of termList.txt?