Query regarding pagination in tweepy (get_followers) of a particular twitter user

Question

I am fairly new to tweepy and pagination using the cursor class. I have been trying to user the cursor class to get all the followers of a particular twitter user but I keep get

Answer 1

There is a handy method called followers_ids. It returns up to 5000 followers (twitter api limit) ids for the given screen_name (or id, user_id or cursor).

Then, you can paginate these results manually in python and call lookup_users for every chunk. As long as lookup_users can handle only 100 user ids at a time (twitter api limit), it's pretty logical to set chunk size to 100.

Here's the code (pagination part was taken from here):

import itertools
import tweepy


def paginate(iterable, page_size):
    while True:
        i1, i2 = itertools.tee(iterable)
        iterable, page = (itertools.islice(i1, page_size, None),
                list(itertools.islice(i2, page_size)))
        if len(page) == 0:
            break
        yield page


auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(<consumer_key>, <consumer_secret>)
auth.set_access_token(<key>, <secret>)

api = tweepy.API(auth)

followers = api.followers_ids(screen_name='gvanrossum')

for page in paginate(followers, 100):
    results = api.lookup_users(user_ids=page)
    for result in results:
        print result.screen_name

Hope that helps.