Parsing tweets links, users and hash tags with django and python-twitter.

Hello again. Today I'm going to continue my previous post concerning django and twitter. Last time we've finished after synchronising with twitter. This time I'm gonna show you how to parse list of received tweets for rendering it in our template so that links,hash tags and users mentions are treated as clickable links. So here's the code, I've added some comments to clarify what we're doing currently:

def parse_tweets(tweets):
    import re
    
    result = []
    for tw in tweets:
        tweet = tw.text;
        #compile regexes as objects
        hash_regex = re.compile(r'#[0-9a-zA-Z+_]*',re.IGNORECASE) 
        user_regex = re.compile(r'@[0-9a-zA-Z+_]*',re.IGNORECASE)
        
        #first deal with links. Any http://... string change to a proper link
        tweet = re.sub('http://[^ ,]*', lambda t: "%s" % (t.group(0), t.group(0)), tweet)
        
        #for all elements matching our pattern...
        for usr in user_regex.finditer(tweet):
            
            #for each whole match replace '@' with ''
            url_tweet = usr.group(0).replace('@','')

            #in tweet's text replace text with proper link, now without '@'
            tweet = tweet.replace(usr.group(0),
                ''+usr.group(0)+'')

        #do the same for hash tags
        for hash in hash_regex.finditer(tweet):
            url_hash = hash.group(0).replace('#','%23')
            if len ( hash.group(0) ) > 2:
                tweet = tweet.replace(hash.group(0),
                    ''+hash.group(0)+''); 

        #append each tweet to our list. Here I'm creating a dict containing tweet's text and date
        posts.append({'tweet': tweet, 'date': s.pub_time})   
    return posts

And now to show it in template :

{% for t in tweets %}


{% for k, v in t.items %}

{% ifequal k 'summary' %}

{{ v|safe }}

{% else %}

{% ifequal k 'date' %}

{{v|timesince}} ago

{% endifequal %}

{% endifequal %}

{% endfor %}


{% endfor %}     

Probably there are better ways of doing this, but this one works for me. If you have any questions just write a comment or follow me via twitter