Things Every Developer Should Know

Use the id_str field instead of id whenever present to stay safe. Your web browser/Javascript interpreter/JSON consumer may munge our large integer-based ids which is why it's recommended to use the string representation. See Twitter IDs, JSON and Snowflake.

If you are starting with the API, please familiarize yourself with the API FAQ and know that it exists.

The Twitter API currently consists of two discrete REST APIs and a Streaming API. Most application developers mix and match the APIs to produce their application. The separation of the REST and Search APIs is less than ideal and it is entirely due to history It is in our pipeline to ameliorate Twitter’s API by combining the Search and REST pieces as development cycles allow. The API Overview portion of the Getting Started series explains the history. The Streaming API provides low-latency high-volume access to Tweets.

API usage is rate limited with additional fair use limits to protect Twitter from abuse.

Methods to retrieve data from the Twitter API require a GET request. Methods that submit, change, or destroy data require a POST. A DELETE request is also accepted for methods that destroy data. API Methods that require a particular HTTP method will return an error if you do not make your request with the correct one. HTTP Response Codes are meaningful.

With the exception of the Streaming API, the Twitter API attempts to conform to the design principles of Representational State Transfer (REST). Simply change the format extension a request to get results in the format of your choice. The documentation notes which formats are available for each method. The API presently supports the following data formats: XML, JSON, and the RSS and Atom syndication formats, with some methods only accepting a subset of these formats.

Some API methods take optional or requisite parameters. Two things to keep in mind when making requests with parameters:

• Parameter values should be converted to UTF-8 and URL encoded.
• The page parameter begins at 1, not 0.

There are two special parameters in the Twitter API:

• callback: Used only when requesting JSON formatted responses, this parameter wraps your response in a callback method of your choice. For example, appending callback=myFancyFunction to your request will result in a response body of: myFancyFunction(...). Callbacks may only contain alphanumeric characters and underscores; any invalid characters will be stripped.
• suppress_response_codes: If this parameter is present, all responses will be returned with a 200 OK status code - even errors. This parameter exists to accommodate Flash and JavaScript applications running in browsers that intercept all non-200 responses. If used, it’s then the job of the client to determine error states by parsing the response body. Use with caution, as those error messages may change.

Where noted, some API methods will return different results based on HTTP headers sent by the client. Where the same behavior can be controlled by both a parameter and an HTTP header, the parameter will take precedence.

Rest API Limit

Clients may access a theoretical maximum of 3,200 statuses via the page and count parameters for the user_timeline REST API methods. Other timeline methods have a theoretical maximum of 800 statuses. Requests for more than the limit will result in a reply with a status code of 200 and an empty result in the format requested. Twitter still maintains a database of all the tweets sent by a user. However, to ensure performance of the site, this artificial limit is temporarily in place.

Search API Limit

Clients may request up to 1,500 statuses via the page and rpp parameters for the search method. The response to a request exceeding this limit will be a status code of 403 and the error message page parameter out of range in the format requested. This artificial limit is in place to ensure the performance of the search system. We also restrict the size of the search index by placing a date limit on the updates we allow you to search. This limit varies depending on the number of Tweets being created and the relevance of the results.

The community has created numerous Twitter API libraries. If you know of others we haven’t got let us know.