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Bulk convert Twitter ids to usernames without Twitter API

Apr 18, 2022 · Last updated: May 26, 2022 ·

I recently had a need to convert a big list of permanent Twitter user ids to usernames. Here's how I did it.

Getting the username from an id is as easy as following what this URL redirects to: https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=<Twitter_id>. But doing this is bulk requires using the Twitter API in some way. Registering for Twitter developer account requires verifying your phone number and I didn't want to deal with credentials for this temporary task.

Meanwhile, I found tweeterid.com. It allows you to convert Twitter ids to screen names but you have to do it one by one.

Inspecting the network tab in the developer console, I found that it makes a POST request to https://tweeterid.com/ajax.php with the data input=<twitter_id>. So for my list of ~400 ids, I made a file named twids with each line containing one id, and ran the following command in my terminal:

xargs -I {} curl -s -d 'input={}' 'https://tweeterid.com/ajax.php' -w '\n' < twids

This command takes each line of twids file, makes a POST request with the data, and writes out the response to stdout separated by newline characters.