How can I unwrap t.co links with Python?

Question

I want to expand t.co short links into a full URL. How can I do that?

Answer 1

The easiest way in python2 is to use urllib2.urlopen():

tco_url = "http://t.co/whatever"
req = urllib2.urlopen(tco_url)
print req.url

will print the URL tco_url finally resolves to, after following all redirects.

Answer 2

Using requests, you could write:

>>> import requests
>>> print(requests.get("http://t.co/UVgwaemZ").url)
http://paper.li/vascoda/vascoda-partner

Answer 3

You should be able to use Twitter's API. Each tweet has a JSON representation; reading JSON from Python is straightforward.

One of the entities contained in the JSON is expanded_url, defined as "The fully resolved URL".