scrape a user's entire tweets

Question

I'd like to pull all of a user's tweets. I could do this the hard way (manually scraping twitter) or the easy way: using their api. The problem with the easy (api) way is that I seem to be limited to the 200 most recent tweets. What's a simple way to get all tweets? Thanks

Answer 1

Yes you can get up to 3,200 historical tweets by requesting as follows...

Make a request to:

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.format

And use the count parameter 200 and iterate through the page parameter from page 1 to 16 or until there are no more tweets.

Thats the only thing you can currently do because Twitter specifically say they prevent this in their API Doc...

https://apiwiki.twitter.com/Things-Every-Developer-Should-Know#6Therearepaginationlimits

I would add, please don't screen-scrape because it will cause undue load on Twitter and in bulk requests it would probably get your server blocked from accessing Twitter.