Not able to get Country of a Tweet - Twython API

Question

I am using the following code to collect Tweets pertaining to a certain topic but in all the tweets that I have extracted the 'places' attribute is None. Am I doing something wrong? Also, the code is meant to extract existing tweets and I do not need streaming api solution and not looking for this solution of streaming API : https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-get-a-stream-of-tweets-from-a-particular-country-using-Twitter-API

api =   Twython(consumer_key, consumer_secret, access_key, access_secret)

tweets                          =   []
MAX_ATTEMPTS                    =   200
COUNT_OF_TWEETS_TO_BE_FETCHED   =   10000
in_max_id = sys.argv[1]
next_max_id = ''
for i in range(0,MAX_ATTEMPTS):

    if(COUNT_OF_TWEETS_TO_BE_FETCHED < len(tweets)):
        break # we got 500 tweets... !!

    #----------------------------------------------------------------#
    # STEP 1: Query Twitter
    # STEP 2: Save the returned tweets
    # STEP 3: Get the next max_id
    #----------------------------------------------------------------#

    # STEP 1: Query Twitter
    if(0 == i):
        # Query twitter for data. 
        results    = api.search(q="#something",count='100',lang='en',max_id=in_max_id,include_entities='true',geo= True)
    else:
        # After the first call we should have max_id from result of previous call. Pass it in query.
        results    = api.search(q="#something",include_entities='true',max_id=next_max_id,lang='en',geo= True)

    # STEP 2: Save the returned tweets
    for result in results['statuses']:

        temp = ""
        tweet_text = result['text']
        temp += tweet_text.encode('utf-8') + " "
        hashtags = result['entities']['hashtags']
        for i in hashtags:
            temp += i['text'].encode('utf-8') + " " 
        print result
        #temp += i["place"]["country"] + "\n"
        #output_file.write(temp)




    # STEP 3: Get the next max_id
    try:
        # Parse the data returned to get max_id to be passed in consequent call.
        next_results_url_params    = results['search_metadata']['next_results']
        next_max_id        = next_results_url_params.split('max_id=')[1].split('&')[0]
    except:
        # No more next pages
        break

Answer 1

The short answer is, No, you are doing nothing wrong. The reason why all place tags are empty is because statistically they are very unlikely to contain data. Only about 1% of all tweets have data in their place tag. This is because users rarely tweet their location. Location is off by default.

Download 100 or more tweets and you probably will find place tag data.

Answer 2

If place field is a MUST for all the tweet that you app will process, then you can limit your search over a place to make sure all the result will definitely have it.

You can doing so by setting geocode (latitude,longitude,radius[km/mi]) parameter, to limit your search within an area.

An example such request via Twython is:

geocode = '25.032341,55.385557,100mi'
api.search(q="#something",count='100',lang='en',include_entities='true',geocode=geocode)