import urllib2
import simplejson as json

def search(q='',geo=''):
    """ use search api to find tweets matching a query string and/or 
        location as string of "lat,lon,radius", see api documentation"""
    query = 'http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%s&format=json&rpp=100&result_type=recent&geocode=%s' % (q,geo)
    f = urllib2.urlopen(query)
    r = json.loads(f.read())
    return r["results"]

def parse(res):
    """ take the relevant parts of the result"""
    #list of tuples (user,time,geo)
    return [(r['from_user'],r['created_at'],r['geo']) 
            for r in res if r['geo'] != None]

    
if __name__ == "__main__":
    tag = '%23fail' 
    geo = '55.583333,13.033333,100km' #Malmo, Sweden
    
    #query Search API
    print parse(search(q=tag,geo=geo))