Part 15: How To Check If An Account Is Following Back And Retrieve Mutual Followers/Following Between Two Accounts

This tutorial is part of a series where different aspects of programming with steem-python are explained. Links to the other tutorials can be found in the curriculum section below. This part will look further to the Account class. You will learn how to retrieve followers and following for an account. Further comparisons between accounts will be made to display relations.

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What will I learn

• Retrieve list of followers/following
• Check if following follows back
• Check for mutual followers/following between two accounts

Requirements

• Python3.6
• steem-python

Difficulty

• Basic

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Tutorial

Setup

Download the files from Github. There are two files check_following.py and compare.py. check_following.py takes 1 account while compare.py takes 2 accounts.

Run scripts as following:
> python check_following account
> python compare account1 account2

Retrieve list of followers/following

The account class contains two functions that deal with followers and following. These functions can be used to retrieve the current list of followers/following.

def get_followers(self):
    return [x['follower'] for x in self._get_followers(direction="follower")]

def get_following(self):
    return [x['following'] for x in self._get_followers(direction="following")]

Create an account object from the username for which you want to retrieve the list of followers/following.

from steem.account import Account

account = Account(username)

list_followers = account.get_followers()
list_following = account.get_following

Check if following follows back

To check if an user that the account is following is following the account back, first the following account list is retrieved. Then for each following a second following list is retrieved and this is then checked for the original account.

for following in Account(account).get_following():
    print ('\n' + following)
    if account in Account(following).get_following():
        print  ('Follow back: Yes')
    else:
        print  ('Follow back: No')

Check for mutual followers/following between two accounts

To check for mutual followers/following between two accounts first the necessary lists have to be retrieved. Then for each account in the list this has to be checked with the corresponding list from the other account. In case of a match this is added to a list, which is printed at the end.

mutual_following = []

for following in account2_following:
    if following in account1_following:
        mutual_following.append(following)

The runtime of the script varies hugely depending on the amount of followers/following each account has. For this reason the data is loaded at the beginning while all the comparisons are done in memory.

Running the script

Running check_following.py simply prints out a each account that is being followed and also states if this account is following the user back.

$ python check_following.py juliank

acidyo
Follow back: Yes

acromott
Follow back: Yes

adonisabril
Follow back: Yes

check_following.py compares the followers and following of two accounts and prints out a report of mutual relationships.

Account1: juliank
Account2: amosbastian

Follow back: Yes
Mutual following: 5
['acidyo', 'emrebeyler', 'oups', 'photocontests', 'steempytutorials']
Mutual followers: 51
['a-0-0', 'a-0-1', 'a-a-a', 'amrizal', 'andre-verbrick', 'andrikyokyo', 'aninhasalegre', 'aqim', 'atenean101', 'azharie', 'barranger', 'byresteem', 'elfexor', 'emrebeyler', 'eva.milli', 'eventta', 'fadhlon', 'faustino', 'fujaxxi', 'gamemusic', 'hendrasaputra', 'hugewhale', 'ionutciobanu', 'ishotz', 'jackmun', 'khalidniazi', 'lautenglye', 'mahamudul', 'meansunlare', 'melindaa', 'mishakhan93', 'munaa', 'nilesh.katuwal', 'obaidur9595', 'petlover', 'reddyyeswanth', 'sam-muffins', 'schlijk', 'setianyareza', 'shaunven', 'siralex', 'steem-trending', 'sulemna', 'talhadogan', 'technogadgets', 'umairkhalid', 'vaansteam', 'viking-ventures', 'xvz', 'yaminhi', 'zeldam']

Curriculum

Set up:

• Part 0: How To Install Steem-python, The Official Steem Library For Python
• Part 1: How To Configure The Steempy CLI Wallet And Upvote An Article With Steem-Python

Filtering

• Part 2: How To Stream And Filter The Blockchain Using Steem-Python
• Part 6: How To Automatically Reply To Mentions Using Steem-Python

Voting

• Part 3: Creating A Dynamic Autovoter That Runs 24/7
• Part 4: How To Follow A Voting Trail Using Steem-Python
• Part 8: How To Create Your Own Upvote Bot Using Steem-Python

Posting

• Part 5: Post An Article Directly To The Steem Blockchain And Automatically Buy Upvotes From Upvote Bots
• Part 7: How To Schedule Posts And Manually Upvote Posts For A Variable Voting Weight With Steem-Python

Constructing

• Part 10: Use Urls To Retrieve Post Data And Construct A Dynamic Post With Steem-Python

Rewards

• Part 9: How To Calculate A Post's Total Rewards Using Steem-Python
• Part 12: How To Estimate Curation Rewards Using Steem-Python
• Part 14: How To Estimate All Rewards In Last N Days Using Steem-Python

Transfers

• Part 11: How To Build A List Of Transfers And Broadcast These In One Transaction With Steem-Python
• Part 13: Upvote Posts In Batches Based On Current Voting Power With Steem-Python

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The code for this tutorial can be found on GitHub!

This tutorial was written by @juliank in conjunction with @amosbastian.

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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