#! /usr/bin/env python

# twitref: show recent refs to a search term.
# Helpful for checking whether anyone's referred to your @handle recently.
# No twitter authentication needed.
# Copyright 2011 by Akkana Peck:
# Please share, modify and enjoy under the GPLv2 or higher.

import sys
import simplejson, urllib, urllib2

# Set socket connection timeout shorter, since the app blocks
# waiting for Twitter's sometimes very long timeouts:
import socket
socket.setdefaulttimeout(60)

def get_search_data(query):
    s = simplejson.loads(urllib2.urlopen(
            urllib2.Request("http://search.twitter.com/search.json",
                            urllib.urlencode({"q": query}))).read())
    return s

def json_search(query):
    for data in get_search_data(query)["results"]:
        yield data

# optional main
if __name__ == "__main__" :
    for searchterm in sys.argv[1:] :
        print "**** Tweets containing", searchterm
        statuses = json_search(searchterm)
        for st in statuses :
            print st['created_at']
            print "<%s> %s" % (st['from_user'].encode('utf-8',
                                                      'backslashreplace'),
                               st['text'].encode('utf-8', 'backslashreplace'))
            # st['id'] and st['id_str'] can be compared to see if
            # a tweet is new since we last checked.
            print ""