sweden_twitter_trends.py

import twitter
import json
import csv

# == OAuth Authentication ==
# The consumer keys can be found on your application's Details
# page located at https://dev.twitter.com/apps ("Keys and Access tokens" tab)
consumer_key=""
consumer_secret=""

# Create an access token under the the "Your access token" section
access_token=""
access_token_secret=""

auth = twitter.oauth.OAuth(access_token, access_token_secret,consumer_key, consumer_secret)
twitter_api = twitter.Twitter(auth=auth)

# WARNING you will only be able to ask for trends using this code 15 timesin 15 minutes otherwiese you will be RATE LMITED
# https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public/rate-limits

# The Yahoo! Where On Earth ID for the entire world is 1.
# See https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/trends/place and
# http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/
# Get codes at http://woeid.rosselliot.co.nz/
SWEDEN_WOE_ID = 23424954
# Prefix ID with the underscore for query string parameterization.
# Without the underscore, the twitter package appends the ID value
# to the URL itself as a special case keyword argument.
sweden_trends = twitter_api.trends.place(_id=SWEDEN_WOE_ID)

# print in a readable format to the console, this is important as 
# it allows us to see the hierachy of the object and so we can drill down into
# the object to get the values we want
print json.dumps(sweden_trends, indent=1)

# BY looking at the printout above we can see that Twitter returns a list (it starts with a square bracket)
# and in that list is an object that has two keys, the first the date which has a date value, the second is
# another list called trends, each item in the list is an object with four key/value pairs in it describing each
# trend, in this case we just want the name and the link to the trend
# So lets dig out the list of trends fist to make the following code that gets the two desried avlues from each trend sinpler
trends = sweden_trends[0]['trends']

# open a file for writing to
csvfile = open('sweden_trends.csv', 'w')    
# point a CSV writer at the file
csvwriter = csv.writer(csvfile)

# now loop over the items in the trends list and write the name and URL to file
for trend in trends:
    csvwriter.writerow([trend['name'],trend['url']])

print "done"