Can't destroy statuses or retweets

[jamessamsf]

Hello. I’m trying to delete a status, using Python and the TwitterAPI package. Once authenticated, I have no problem tweeting via the API or destroying favorites. However, when I try to delete a tweet or unretweet a tweet, I get 404 errors. I can successfully do all these things through the gui web interface.

My code:

from TwitterAPI import TwitterAPI
api = TwitterAPI(API_KEY, API_SECRET, ACCESS_TOKEN, ACCESS_SECRET)
r = api.request(‘statuses/destroy/:id’, { ‘id’: tweet_id })
r.status_code
404
r.text
’{“errors”:[{“message”:“Sorry, that page does not exist”,“code”:34}]}’

( tweet_id above is an int populated elsewhere. Yes, it’s the value I’m expecting. )

I see in older threads this issue has happened before, but I have not seen a satisfactory reason it happens or what I can do.

Do you know why I can’t destroy tweets or unretweet tweets via the API?

Thanks!

[andypiper]

I’ve not checked this in the TwitterAPI library, but is the api.request call automatically appending the .json to the endpoint? i.e. it would be /1.1/statuses/destroy/:id.json if I was using twurl to do this.

[jamessamsf]

Great point! Thanks. A casually read through the code on GitHub says “maybe.”

[abraham]

Based on the examples on GitHub you need to do the following:

r = api.request('statuses/destroy/:%d' % tweet_id)

Your request is likely generating a URL with a literal :id in it which is not a valid status ID.