Error while fetching Tweets with Tweepy

Question

I have a Python script that fetch tweets. In the script i use the libary Tweepy . I use a valid authentication parameters. After running this script some tweets are stored in my MongoDB and some are refused by the if statement. But still i get the error

requests.packages.urllib3.exceptions.ProtocolError: ('Connection broken: IncompleteRead(0 bytes read, 2457 more expected)'

My question is which part of the script can i improve, so i do not get the error above.

This is my script

    from tweepy import Stream
from tweepy import OAuthHandler
from tweepy.streaming import StreamListener
import time
import json
from pymongo import MongoClient

#Mongo Settings
client = MongoClient()
db = client.Sentiment
Tweets = db.Tweet

#Twitter Credentials
ckey ='myckey'
csecret ='mycsecret'
atoken = 'myatoken'
asecret = 'myasecret'

class listener(StreamListener):

    def on_data(self, data):
        try:  

            tweet = json.loads(data)

            if tweet["lang"] == "nl":
                print tweet["id"]
                Tweets.insert(tweet)



            return True
        except BaseException, e:
            print 'failed on_date,', str(e)
            time.sleep(5)

    def on_error(self, status):
        print status

auth = OAuthHandler(ckey, csecret)
auth.set_access_token(atoken, asecret)
twitterStream = Stream(auth, listener())
twitterStream.filter( track=["geld lenen"
                            ,"lening"
                            ,"Defam"
                            ,"DEFAM"
                            ,"Credivance"
                            ,"CREDIVANCE"
                            ,"Alpha Credit"
                            ,"ALPHA CREDIT"
                            ,"Advanced Finance"
                            ,"krediet"
                            ,"KREDIET"
                            ,"private lease"
                            ,"ing"
                            ,"Rabobank"
                            ,"Interbank"
                            ,"Nationale Nerderlanden"
                            ,"Geldshop"
                            ,"Geldlenen"
                            ,"ABN AMBRO"
                            ,"Independer"
                            ,"DGA adviseur"
                            ,"VDZ"
                            ,"vdz"
                            ,"Financieel Attent"
                            ,"Anderslenen"
                            ,"De Nederlandse Kredietmaatschappij"
                            ,"Moneycare"
                            ,"De Financiele Makelaar Kredieten"
                            ,"Finanplaza"
                            ,"Krediet"
                            ,"CFSN Kredietendesk"
                            ,"De Graaf Assurantien en Financieel Adviseurs"
                            ,"AMBTENARENLENING"
                            ,"VDZ Geldzaken"
                            ,"Financium Primae"
                            ,"SNS"
                            ,"AlfamConsumerCredit"
                            ,"GreenLoans"
                            ], languages="nl" 
                     )

I hope you can help me...

Answer 1

This IncompleteRead error generally tends to occur when your consumption of incoming tweets starts to fall behind, which makes sense in your case given your long list of terms to track. The general approach most people seem to be taking (myself included) is simply to suppress this error and continue your collection (see the link above).

I can't completely remember if IncompleteRead will close your connection (I think it might, because my personal solution reconnects my stream), but you may consider something like the following (I'm just going to wing it, it probably needs reworking for your situation):

# from httplib import IncompleteRead # Python 2
from http.client import IncompleteRead # Python 3
...
while True:
    try:
        # Connect/reconnect the stream
        stream = Stream(auth, listener)
        # DON'T run this approach async or you'll just create a ton of streams!
        stream.filter(terms)
    except IncompleteRead:
        # Oh well, reconnect and keep trucking
        continue
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        # Or however you want to exit this loop
        stream.disconnect()
        break
...

Again, I'm just winging it there, but the moral of the story is that the general approach taken here is to suppress the error and continue.

---

EDIT (10/11/2016): Just a useful tidbit for anyone dealing with very large volumes of tweets - one way to handle this case without losing connection time or tweets would be to drop your incoming tweets into a queuing solution (RabbitMQ, Kafka, etc.) to be ingested/processed by an application reading from that queue.

This moves the bottleneck from the Twitter API to your queue, which should have no problem waiting for you to consume the data.

This is more of a "production" software solution, so if you don't care about losing tweets or reconnecting, the above solution is still perfectly valid.

Answer 2

I had this same problem, solved when I remved languages from the filter function

since it's not yet functional, although Twitter says it is

Instead I keep the check of the language as you did in the on_data(..)

Also I use the on_status(..) instead of on_data(..) as follows:

def on_status(self, status):
    ...
    tweet = json.dumps(status)
    if tweet["lang"] == "nl":
        print tweet["id"]
        Tweets.insert(tweet)
    ...

Other people reported that using twitterStream.filter(track=['word'], languages=['nl']), but it didn't with me.

Answer 3

IncompleteRead error is the diagnostic of a network related issue. On where did you run that script? If the host running this script is behind a firewall, load balancer etc. network packages may be dropped for some reason.