TypeError: file() takes at most 3 arguments (4 given)

Question

I am using Spyder on a Mac and the Python version on Spyder is 2.7. I had been using the following code a few months ago to scrape tweets, but now I find that it no longer works. First, I could no longer use:

from urllib.request import url open

and now use

from urllib2 import url open

However, I am unable to run the code below and get the following error: "with open('%s_tweets.csv' % screen_name, 'w', newline='', encoding='utf-8-sig') as f: TypeError: file() takes at most 3 arguments (4 given)"

import sys
from urllib2 import urlopen

default_encoding = 'utf-8'

import tweepy #https://github.com/tweepy/tweepy
import csv

#Twitter API credentials
consumer_key = ""
consumer_secret = ""
access_key = ""
access_secret = ""

screenNamesList = []

def redirect(url):
page = urlopen(url)
return page.geturl()

def get_all_tweets(screen_name):
#Twitter only allows access to a users most recent 3240 tweets with this method

#authorize twitter, initialize tweepy
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
auth.set_access_token(access_key, access_secret)
api = tweepy.API(auth, wait_on_rate_limit = True)

#initialize a list to hold all the tweepy Tweets
alltweets = []  

#make initial request for most recent tweets (200 is the maximum allowed count)
new_tweets = api.user_timeline(screen_name = screen_name,count=200)

#save most recent tweets
alltweets.extend(new_tweets)

#save the id of the oldest tweet less one
oldest = alltweets[-1].id - 1

#keep grabbing tweets until there are no tweets left to grab
while len(new_tweets) > 0:
    #print "getting tweets before %s" % (oldest)

    #all subsiquent requests use the max_id param to prevent duplicates
    new_tweets = api.user_timeline(screen_name = screen_name,count=200,max_id=oldest)

    #save most recent tweets
    alltweets.extend(new_tweets)

    #update the id of the oldest tweet less one
    oldest = alltweets[-1].id - 1

    #print "...%s tweets downloaded so far" % (len(alltweets))

#transform the tweepy tweets into a 2D array that will populate the csv 
outtweets = [[tweet.id_str, tweet.created_at, tweet.text, tweet.retweet_count, tweet.coordinates, tweet.favorite_count, tweet.author.followers_count, tweet.author.description, tweet.author.location, tweet.author.name] for tweet in alltweets]

#write the csv  

with open('%s_tweets.csv' % screen_name, 'w', newline='', encoding='utf-8-sig') as f:
    writer = csv.writer(f)
    writer.writerow(["id", "created_at", "text", "retweet_count", "coordinates", "favorite_count", "followers_count", "description", "location", "name"])
    writer.writerows(outtweets)

pass


if __name__ == '__main__':   
#pass in the username of the account you want to download
for i, user in enumerate(screenNamesList):
    get_all_tweets(screenNamesList[i])
    i+=1

Answer 1

This code is intended for python 3, where open gets new parameters:

• encoding
• newline

In python 2, there are only 3 parameters possible:

open(name[, mode[, buffering]])

buffering isn't what you want. The others are nowhere to be found.

You can workaround this by using

with open('%s_tweets.csv' % screen_name, 'wb') as f:

opening the handle in binary fixes the "blank line" bug of csv module. With python 3 (only the "old" versions, newest version doesn't need that), you have to pass newline="" since you cannot open a csv file as binary.

To handle both encoding and newline, you could just do as described here:

from io import open

and leave the rest of your code unchanged. Well, almost, you have to prefix unicode for your title like this:

writer.writerow([u"id", u"created_at", u"text", u"retweet_count", u"coordinates", u"favorite_count", u"followers_count", u"description", u"location", u"name"])