Extended Tweets

This supplements Twitter’s Tweet updates documentation and repository.

Introduction

On May 24, 2016, Twitter announced changes to the way that replies and URLs are handled and published plans around support for these changes in the Twitter API and initial technical documentation describing the updates to Tweet objects and API options.1 On September 26, 2017, Twitter started testing 280 characters for certain languages,2 and on November 7, 2017, announced that the character limit was being expanded for Tweets in languages where cramming was an issue.3

Standard API methods

Any tweepy.API method that returns a Status object accepts a new tweet_mode parameter. Valid values for this parameter are compat and extended, which give compatibility mode and extended mode, respectively. The default mode (if no parameter is provided) is compatibility mode.

Compatibility mode

By default, using compatibility mode, the text attribute of Status objects returned by tweepy.API methods is truncated to 140 characters, as needed. When this truncation occurs, the truncated attribute of the Status object will be True, and only entities that are fully contained within the available 140 characters range will be included in the entities attribute. It will also be discernible that the text attribute of the Status object is truncated as it will be suffixed with an ellipsis character, a space, and a shortened self-permalink URL to the Tweet.

Extended mode

When using extended mode, the text attribute of Status objects returned by tweepy.API methods is replaced by a full_text attribute, which contains the entire untruncated text of the Tweet. The truncated attribute of the Status object will be False, and the entities attribute will contain all entities. Additionally, the Status object will have a display_text_range attribute, an array of two Unicode code point indices, identifying the inclusive start and exclusive end of the displayable content of the Tweet.

Handling Retweets

When using extended mode with a Retweet, the full_text attribute of the Status object may be truncated with an ellipsis character instead of containing the full text of the Retweet. However, since the retweeted_status attribute (of a Status object that is a Retweet) is itself a Status object, the full_text attribute of the Retweeted Status object can be used instead.

Example

Given an existing API object and id for a Tweet, the following can be used to print the full text of the Tweet, or if it’s a Retweet, the full text of the Retweeted Tweet:

status = api.get_status(id, tweet_mode="extended")
try:
    print(status.retweeted_status.full_text)
except AttributeError:  # Not a Retweet
    print(status.full_text)

If status is a Retweet, status.full_text could be truncated.

Footnotes

1

https://twittercommunity.com/t/upcoming-changes-to-simplify-replies-and-links-in-tweets/67497

2

https://twittercommunity.com/t/testing-280-characters-for-certain-languages/94126

3

https://twittercommunity.com/t/updating-the-character-limit-and-the-twitter-text-library/96425