Python – API.friends_ids() in Tweepy

Twitter is a popular social network where users share messages called tweets. Twitter allows us to mine the data of any user using Twitter API or Tweepy. The data will be tweets extracted from the user. The first thing to do is get the consumer key, consumer secret, access key and access secret from twitter developer available easily for each user. These keys will help the API for authentication.

API.friends_ids()

The friends_ids() method of the API class in Tweepy module is used to get the IDs of all the friends of a user.

Syntax : API.friends_ids(id / user_id / screen_name)

Parameters : Only use one of the 3 options:

• id : specifies the ID or the screen name of the user.
• user_id : specifies the ID of the user, useful to differentiate accounts when a valid user ID is also a valid screen name.
• screen_name : specifies the screen name of the user, useful to differentiate accounts when a valid screen name is also a user ID.

Returns : a list of Integers

Example 1 : Using friends_ids() method with the screen name.

# import the module
import tweepy

# assign the values accordingly
consumer_key = ""
consumer_secret = ""
access_token = ""
access_token_secret = ""

# authorization of consumer key and consumer secret
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)

# set access to user's access key and access secret
auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)

# calling the api
api = tweepy.API(auth)

# screen name of the user
screen_name = "geeksforgeeks"

# getting the friends list
friends = api.friends_ids(screen_name)

print(screen_name + " is following :")
for friend in friends:
    print(api.get_user(friend).screen_name)

Output :

geeksforgeeks is following :
Topcoder
HackerEarth
hackerrank
iamdevloper
verified
PracticeGfG
GeeksQuiz
sandeep_jain

Example 2 : Using friends_ids() method with the user ID.

# user ID of the user
user_id = 145125358

# getting the friends list
friends = api.friends_ids(user_id)

print(api.get_user(user_id).screen_name + " has " + str(len(friends)) + " friends.")

Output :

SrBachchan has 1829 friends.