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