Originally published on my blog.
I just published a new Python package: tweet-counter (repo).
If you want to automate posting of tweet using Python, it's pretty important to know if your tweet exceeds the 280-character limit.
It turns out, working this out is non-trivial, as Twitter has a few rules around how it count's characters. These are basically:
- Twitter will convert anything that looks like a URL (with a valid TLD - e.g.
example.ae) into a Twitter short link, and count it as taking up exactly 23 characters - Twitter counts emoji and any unicode character above
U+2037as each taking up 2 characters
To it's credit, Twitter provides official open-source libraries for calculating tweet length.
But there isn't a library for Python that I could find. So I made one. It's probably far from perfect, but it does at least take into account the top two conditions, which should cover most common English-language use cases.
$ pip3 install tweet-counter
$ count-tweet "Otters 👪 otters 𝗼𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 otters otters.com/otters"
60
I'm hoping to use it in an automatic tool for turning blog posts into twitter threads that I'm working on.
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