The APIs offered by the two social media giants, Twitter and Facebook, offer plenty of possibilities for data gathering and analysis. From tweets and status messages to numbers of followers and friends, photos, locations and more, there’s a lot of information waiting.

Given my nascent interest in Python, I decided to explore the APIs via some simple scripts, fetching Twitter profile and Facebook page data and writing the values to a SQLite database.

These examples are simple but offer a framework for you (and me) to build upon. SQLite support is built into Python, but you must install the Requests library if you don’t have it.

Facebook Page Data

This script (available on Github) pulls the number of “likes” and “talking about this” for each Facebook page specified in the list called names_list. It creates a SQLite database called social_data.db if none exists and also creates a table to hold the data.

# Fetch Facebook page metrics via Social Graph API into a SQLite DB
# Grabs the number of likes and "talking about" numbers
 
import requests
import sqlite3
import os
from datetime import datetime
 
# These are the accounts for which you will fetch data
names_list = [
    'fallingskies',
    'usatoday'
]
 
# API base URL
base_url = 'https://graph.facebook.com/'
 
# Function to add row to accounts table
def insert_db(handle, likes, talking):
    conn = sqlite3.connect('social_data.db')
    cur = conn.cursor()
    cur.execute('''
        INSERT INTO fbaccounts VALUES (?,?,?,?);
        ''', (datetime.now(), handle, likes, talking))
    conn.commit()
    conn.close()
 
# Create the database if it doesn't exist
if not os.path.exists('social_data.db'):
    conn = sqlite3.connect('social_data.db')
    conn.close()
else:
    pass
 
# Create the table if it's not in the db
conn = sqlite3.connect('social_data.db')
cur = conn.cursor()
cur.execute('''CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS fbaccounts 
    (FetchDate Date, Handle Text, Likes Integer, Talking Integer)
    ''')
conn.commit()
conn.close()
 
# Iterate over handles and hit the API with each
for user in names_list:
    url = base_url + user 
    print 'Fetching ' + user
    response = requests.get(url)
    profile = response.json()
    handle = profile['name']
    likes = profile['likes']
    talking = profile['talking_about_count']
    insert_db(handle, likes, talking)

Twitter profile data

This script (also on Github) is nearly identical to the one above but instead hits the Twitter (more…)

Aug 26, 2012 | Python
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New cat in the house? Check.

Son interested in programming? Check.

Dad eager to learn more Python? Check.

Add it up and you get a little project the two of us worked up over a couple of nights this summer — a Python-based text game called Catch the Cat. You can download the code from its repository on Github. To use it, from a command prompt run:
 

python catchthecat.py

The game’s simple: The cat’s on the loose in the house, and you have to catch it. Every time you move to a new room, the cat moves too — at random. To catch the cat, you both have to arrive in the same place.

OK, so we’re not going to unseat EA Sports here, but we met our goals: we had fun and learned some tricks. While I was using the exercise to help my son work through the logic choices required in game play, I got to add few things to my Python toolkit:

– Using Python’s SQLite integration to build a leaderboard database.

– Writing classes for the cat and player objects.

Have you written Python-based games? Suggestions for improvement here?

Aug 19, 2012 | Programming, Python
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