Twitter content downloaded but tweet time is not correct

[nakul_31]

Hello,

I tried downloading tweets for a specific hashtag, to a csv file. There were two columns as expected - time and the tweet.

I expected the time column is reflective of the accurate date and time at which the tweet was made. To my surprise, the time in the time column is not accurate, in some cases it is 5 hours behind the actual tweet made, some cases it is 7 hours ahead of the time when actual tweet was made. I have checked some samples and there was no variation in the minutes field however and certainly the date is accurate too. Just that, the hour mismatch is there.

Could you please advise, how can i get rid of this anomaly and can download the tweets from APIs which is reflective of the exact time when the tweet was made?

Please let me know if any questions

thanks and regards
Nakul

[boxnumber03]

Are you adjusting for the difference in time zones? The created_at field is UTC time (AKA Greenwich Mean Time). Read about it here: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/data-dictionary/overview/tweet-object.html

[nakul_31]

@boxnumber03: thank you for pointing this out. I didn’t do that while downloading the tweets. For a tweet, i am downloading these two features - tweet.created_at and tweet.text
a python code snippet about the same -

for tweet in tweepy.Cursor(api.search,q="#(text)",count=100,
lang=“en”,
since=“2017-04-03”).items():
csvWriter.writerow([tweet.created_at, tweet.text.encode(‘utf-8’)])

Could you please advise how can i adjust the timezone in created_at field so that accurate timings are reflected?

Thanks and regards
Nakul

[boxnumber03]

That is probably a question better answered using a search engine. For example, you can try googling “python convert utc to local time.”

[nakul_31]

Thanks for the suggestion @boxnumber03. i will do that.

I have a quick question if you could please help. How far back can we go and download the tweets or how many tweets we can download in one single instance. I thought using above code and providing values to parameters such as “since” and “until”, we can overcome this limit of number of tweets and duration but apparently that was not the case. I gave one month window in the code but only one week tweets got downloaded.

Could you please advise anything on this?

thanks and regards
Nakul

[LeBraat]

Hey @nakul_31 - I suggest for you to read through our Search API documentation. We have a lot of existing resources that you can use to answer your questions.

Please make sure to both read through our documentation and search the forums before you post new topics

[LeBraat]