This is a python package that makes it easier to add users to your Twitter list from other lists.

Say you've created a covid twitter list to keep track of news around the pandemic. You've just found another list on covid curated by an epidemiologist in London, and you want to add members from it to your own Covid list. This is the package you use for that.

This package will help heavy twitter and tweetdeck users, especially those who use lists to manage the firehose of information from social media.

You can install it by going to the terminal and typing

pip install twitter_list_mgmt

Versions of Tweepy >= 4.0.0a0 are required for this package to work. At the time of writing, 4.0 is in alpha, so it might not be available from pypi. Install it from the terminal by doing

pip install git+https://github.com/tweepy/tweepy.git

In terms of setting up, you'll have to create authentication credentials for yourself. (This article from Realpython has a how-to on it.) Four text strings will be generated -- Consumer Key, Consumer Secret, Access Token and Access Token Secret. Create a file named 'config_twitter.ini', use the format below and paste in the credentials (You can also download a sample file here.)

[info]
CONSUMER_KEY = XXXXXX
CONSUMER_SECRET = XXXXXX
ACCESS_TOKEN = XXXXXX
ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET = XXXXXX

Import the package into your code with

import twitter_list_mgmt as tlm

The package has 7 main functions:

1. Add members to your list from another list — Here 'list1' and 'list2' are twitter list ids, with list1 being the one you own. (You can get the ids from the url for a list page. For example, in the url https://twitter.com/i/lists/15299140, the list id is '15299140'.)

tlm.add_to_list1_from_list2(list1, list2)

2. Add members to your list from several other lists — 'multiple_lists' is a python list of twitter list ids.

tlm.add_to_list1_from_multiple_lists(list1, multiple_lists)

3. Remove users from your list who are in another list — Let's say you have a twitter list on covid that's a mix of experts and journalists, and you want it to have experts only. Now you can remove many of the journalists from it manually, but you can also do it in an automated fashion by getting a list of science/health journalists. Using this function, if any of your list members are on that journalist list, they'll be removed. 'list1' here is your list.

tlm.remove_from_list1_based_on_list2(list1, list2)

4. Remove members from your list who are in any of the other lists specified

tlm.remove_from_list1_based_on_multiple_lists(list1,multiple_lists)

5. Create a new list that consolidates members from several lists — 'multiple_lists' is the python list containing the twitter list ids and 'list_name' is the name for the new list.

tlm.create_list_union(multiple_lists,list_name)

6. Create a new list that has members common to several lists — 'multiple_lists' is the python list containing the twitter list ids and 'list_name' is the name for the new list.

tlm.create_list_intersection(multiple_lists,list_name)

7. Create a new list with all the members from a list, who aren't in any of the other lists specified — 'list1' can be your own list or someone else's, 'multiple_lists' is a python list of twitter list ids and 'list_name' is the name for the new list.

tlm.create_list_difference(list1,multiple_lists,list_name)

The functions that have been listed are the main ones. There are others too, but most people won't have a need for them. Will go through some of them for coders who want to build something based on them. (Take a look at helpers.py to see how they've been defined.)

These are some of the other functions:

• Extract the list id from a list url — Returns the list_id as a string.

tlm.get_list_id_from_url(url)

• Get all the members of a list — The function returns a python list of their user ids.

tlm.get_list_members_ids(list_idx)

• Add user ids to a list — 'ids' here is a python list of user ids and 'list1' is the id for your twitter list.

tlm.add_ids_to_list(ids,list1)

• Remove user ids from a list — 'ids' here is a python list of user ids and 'list1' is the id for your twitter list.

tlm.remove_ids_from_list(ids,list1)

• Create a pandas dataframe from a list — Here, each row is for a different member and each column an attribute like number of followers, number of tweets posted etc. This is for anyone who wants to analyze the membership of a list.

tlm.get_df_from_list(list_idx)

I'm not a professional developer/programmer/coder, so am sure there are things here I should be doing differently. If you have any suggestions, please contact me on [email protected] or at my twitter handle @shijith.

For example, I would be especially interested in hearing about my python application layout, whether it could be simplified further, if I could be doing imports better etc.