[Tutor] Responding Tweet: A Twitter Bot

[Dave Angel]

 Zaki Akhmad <zakiakhmad at gmail.com> Wrote in message:
> On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 7:39 PM, James Scholes <james at jls-radio.com> wrote:
> 
>> Most decent Python libraries for accessing Twitter support the streaming
>> API.  This lets you keep a connection to the Twitter API alive and
>> process new data as it is received.  There is a simple (but out-of-date)
>> example on using streaming with the twitter package you linked to:
>> https://pypi.python.org/pypi/twitter/1.13.1
> 
> My question is: how to execute this streaming API?
> 
> My current approach is using cron to execute python script which has
> "check the streaming API" function:
> 
> def check_mention:
>     if (mention):
>         tweet
> 
> If I want to check every minute, then I should configure cron to
> execute this script every minute. Are there any other approach besides
> using cron?
> 
>
> 
> 

import time

while True:
     do|something
     time.sleep (60)

Note that sleep () doesn't hog the processor;  very nearly 100% of
 the processor is given to the other processes.  Further,  you
 don't have the startup time you'd have with cron.

There are tradeoffs,  but sleep is usually what you want.

-- 
DaveA