python - Get All Follower IDs in Twitter by Tweepy

Question

Is it possible to get the full follower list of an account who has more than one million followers, like McDonald's?

I use Tweepy and follow the code:

c = tweepy.Cursor(api.followers_ids, id = 'McDonalds')
ids = []
for page in c.pages():
     ids.append(page)

I also try this:

for id in c.items():
    ids.append(id)

But I always got the 'Rate limit exceeded' error and there were only 5000 follower ids.

Answer 1

In order to avoid rate limit, you can/should wait before the next follower page request. Looks hacky, but works:

import time
import tweepy

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(..., ...)
auth.set_access_token(..., ...)

api = tweepy.API(auth)

ids = []
for page in tweepy.Cursor(api.followers_ids, screen_name="McDonalds").pages():
    ids.extend(page)
    time.sleep(60)

print len(ids)

Hope that helps.