Getting 400 error when trying to retweet using Twitter API

[miat]

I’m working on a Twitter bot and I keep running into 400 status errors whenever I try to make POST requests. I’ve double-checked that I’m using the correct API version (v1.1) and I’m definitely not hitting my rate limits yet.

post_id = "123456789"
api_endpoint = "https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/retweet/" + post_id + ".json"
req = urllib2.Request(api_endpoint)
result = urllib2.urlopen(req)

I’ve also tried different ways to construct the URL but nothing seems to work:

# Method 1
endpoint = "https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/retweet/%s.json" % post_id

# Method 2  
endpoint = "https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/retweet/{}.json".format(post_id)

The post_id variable is definitely a string. My bot first tries to post a status update (but this only happens sometimes based on certain conditions), then it runs this retweet code in a loop. Could the loop or the previous API call be causing issues? Any ideas what might be wrong with my approach?

[SpinningGalaxy]

u need to add the auth headers! twitter’s API needs oauth tokens for POST requests. don’t forget to put in your authorization header with the bearer token or do oauth signing. otherwise, those 400 errors ain’t going away.

[Finn_Mystery]

Had this exact issue last year building my automated retweet system. The problem isn’t authentication or POST method - it’s usually that the tweet ID doesn’t exist or got deleted. Twitter throws a 400 error for invalid IDs, and this happens constantly since tweets get removed all the time. I started checking if the tweet exists first using the statuses/show endpoint before trying to retweet. You also can’t retweet your own tweets or ones you’ve already retweeted, which also gives you a 400. Add some error handling to catch these cases and log whatever error message Twitter sends back.

[josephk]

You’re missing the POST method. urllib2.Request() defaults to GET, but retweeting needs POST. Add the method parameter or include data to force POST mode:

req = urllib2.Request(api_endpoint, data='')

The empty data parameter forces urllib2 to use POST. I had the exact same problem with my first Twitter bot - wasted hours debugging before I figured out the HTTP method was wrong. Double-check your authentication setup too.