The first version of Twitter API only allows us to retrieve 3200 tweets from each account. Now the good news is academic API2 allows us to retrieve all the tweets from an account.

Check here to see the new API https://developer.twitter.com/en/products/twitter-api/academic-research

The new API introduces plenty of search methods.

See what's new in here: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/early-access

One of the coolest functions I've tried is to retrieve timeline status beyond the limit of 3200 tweets. My way of doing it is to search the recent 10 tweets, record the earliest tweet id you retrieve, and do a search of 500 tweet using the earliest tweet id as the cut off. Then you repeat this process N times until you collect all the tweets from the account.

Step 1, register your academic API account. Define a search tweet function parsing your bearer token. You can change max_result to define the number of tweets you want to collect

def search_twitter(self):
        """Define search twitter function."""

        headers = {"Authorization": "Bearer {}".format(self.bearer_token)}

        url = "https://api.twitter.com/2/tweets/search/all?query={}&{}&max_results=500&until_id={}".format(
            self.query, self.tweet_fields, self.until_id)
        response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers)

       #Here I define if an error occur, my script will stop for 1 minute
        if response.status_code != 200:
            time.sleep(60) 
        return response.json()

Step 2, Suppose you want to collect all the tweets from a list of handles, for each handle, you collect the recent 10 tweet. Each tweet has a timestamp, we rank the tweets according to the timestamps.

def search_twitter_recent(self, bearer_token, query, tweet_fields):

        """Define search recent twitter function."""

        #curl "https://api.twitter.com/2/tweets/search/all?query=from%3Atwitterdev&max_results=500&start_time=2020-01-01T00%3A00%3A00Z&end_time=2020-03-31T11%3A59%3A59Z"

        headers = {"Authorization": "Bearer {}".format(self. bearer_token)}

        url = "https://api.twitter.com/2/tweets/search/recent?query={}&{}&max_results=10".format(query, self.tweet_fields)
        response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers) #here you can change the max_result to define the number of tweets you want

        print(response.status_code)

        if response.status_code != 200:
            raise Exception(response.status_code, response.text)
        return response.json()
Step 3, We obtain the tweetid from the earliest tweet (ranked by timestamp) among the recent 10 tweet, then we run the search_twitter function and set the until id to the earliest tweetid. In this step, we collect the 500 tweets before the earliest tweet.

We repeat this process in a loop for N iterations. We don't know how many iterations we need in order to obtain all the tweets from a user. To solve this problem, we can retrieve the number of tweets of an account using the status_timeline function, and define loop_num = (status_num//500) + 1 

def big_loop(self):
        handles = self.read_handles(self.handlesFile)

        for handle, status in zip(handles['screen_name'], handles['statuses_count']):
            # get handle name and pass it to query
            query = 'from:{}'.format(handle)

            #define how many loops we need in order to collect all the tweets of an account
            loop_num = (status//500) + 1 

            #get the most recent 10 tweets of an account
            search_result = self.search_twitter_recent(self.bearer_token, query, self.tweet_fields)

            # here you can also manually reset the id
            print(query, loop_num, until_id)
            time.sleep(5) #check rate limit to adjust this
            #https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/rate-limits#v2-limits 
            

            # loop everything
        
            for i in range(1, loop_num + 1):

                print('this is the {} loop'.format(i))
                # collect tweets using query, for each loop, we get 500 tweets

                search_result = c.search_twitter()
              
                print('search id:', search_result['data'][-1]['id'])

                #set the new until_id as the last one on the list, next loop will continue up to this id
                new_until_id = search_result['data'][-1]['id']
                until_id = new_until_id

                time.sleep(5)#sleep 10s

Now you should be able to get all the tweets from an account...

For full version of the code, check this.