I converted the time to an integer, factored it into prime factors, and made a bot to tweet the result (xkcd material)

Introduction

It's been three months since I registered for the application with enthusiasm, "I'll use Twitter with Python!" When I was thinking that I had to make something, I found this story on xkcd. Factoring the Time - xkcd.com I created a bot that automates the work of factoring the time into prime factors, which this man (?) Was killing time, and tweeting the result. It works like this.

environment

• Ubuntu 16.04
• Python 2.7
  • tweepy
  • sympy
  • datetime
  • time

procedure

Anyway, it is application registration. Since many articles have been written, I will omit it here. If you google for "twitter python registration", you should see some.

Create a file called token and write the obtained character string to it.

token

"Consumer Key"
"Consumer Secret"
"Access Token"
"Access Secret"

After writing like this, create main.py in the same directory and edit it.

main.py

# coding:utf-8
import tweepy
from datetime import datetime
import sympy
import time


def login():
    with open("token") as f:
        (consumer_key,
         consumer_secret,
         access_token,
         access_secret) = f.read().split("\n")[:4]
    auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
    auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_secret)
    api = tweepy.API(auth)
    return api


def get_factor_by_string(i):
    d = sympy.factorint(i)
    return "*".join(str(fact) for fact in d for num in range(d[fact]))


def get_time_by_int():
    return int(datetime.now().strftime('%H%M'))


def main():
    api = login()
    old = get_time_by_int()
    while True:
        now = get_time_by_int()
        if now != old and now != 0 and now != 1:
            old = now
            factor = get_factor_by_string(now)
            if "*" in factor:
                text = str(now) + "=" + factor
            else:
                text = str(now) + " is a prime number"
            api.update_status(text)
        time.sleep(0.1)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

When executed, it will tweet the result of factoring the time almost every minute. You did it!

Commentary

I don't think it's necessary, but for the time being ... The flow of the program is like this ① twitter authentication with tweepy ② Get the current time with datetime ③ Return to ② if the time has already been tweeted ④ Prime factorization and format change with sympy ⑤ Tweet the result (return to ②) Twitter is authenticated using the information in token with login (). Use datetime.now (). Strftime () with get_time_by_int () to get the number of the present tense and the present tense (like 12:30 → 1230). Here, if the time has already been tweeted, or if the number returned is 0 or 1, the next process will not start. I use sympy.factorint () for prime factorization. The result is returned in the dictionary type {prime factor: exponent, prime factor: exponent ...}, so use for to convert it to a form of multiplication without exponent. Finally, change the message depending on whether the result of prime factorization contains * (whether the time number is a prime number) and tweet with ʻapi.update.status ()`. As a result of relying on the library for almost all of the processing, it fits in less than 50 lines. Python is amazing.

in conclusion

It was my first bot creation, but I found that it was fairly easy to create a simple one. I'm running it properly, so it sometimes stops, but I want to move it for a few more days.