Hopefully you can find an answer here to one of your questions. If not, please contact help@twilio.com.

If you get an error that looks like this:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "twilio.py", line 1, in <module>
    from twilio.rest import TwilioRestClient
  File "/.../twilio-python/docs/twilio.py", line 1, in <module>
    from twilio.rest import TwilioRestClient
ImportError: No module named rest

Check to make sure that you don't have a file named twilio.py; Python will try to load the Twilio library from your twilio.py file instead of from the Twilio library.

If you get an error that looks like this:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test.py", line 1, in <module>
    import twilio.rest
ImportError: No module named twilio.rest

Your Python installation cannot find the library.

Check which versions of pip and Python you are running with this command in the Terminal:

which -a python
which -a pip

pip needs to install the Twilio library to a path that your Python executable can read from. Sometimes there will be more than one version of pip, like pip-2.5, pip-2.7 etc. You can find all of them by running compgen -c | grep pip (works with Bash on *nix machines). There can also be more than one version of Python, especially if you have Macports or homebrew.

You also may be using an outdated version of the twilio-python library, which did not use a twilio.rest.TwilioRestClient object. Check which version of the twilio library you have installed by running this command:

$ pip freeze | grep twilio          # Or pip-2.7 freeze etc.

The latest version (as of January 2012) is 3.3. If you are running an outdated version, you can upgrade with this command:

$ pip install --upgrade twilio

Note that if you have code that uses the older version of the library, it may break when you upgrade your site.

Twilio always returns phone numbers that are formatted in the E.164 format, like this: +12125551234. However your users may enter them like this: (212) 555-1234. This can lead to problems when, for example, Twilio makes a POST request to your server with the From phone number as +12125551234, but you stored the phone number in your database as (212) 555-1234, causing a database lookup to fail.

We suggest that you convert the number to E.164 format before you store it in the database. The phonenumbers library is excellent for this purpose. Install it like this:

$ pip install phonenumbers

Then you can convert user input to phone numbers like this:

import phonenumbers

def convert_to_e164(raw_phone):
    if not raw_phone:
        return

    if raw_phone[0] == '+':
        # Phone number may already be in E.164 format.
        parse_type = None
    else:
        # If no country code information present, assume it's a US number
        parse_type = "US"

    phone_representation = phonenumbers.parse(raw_phone, parse_type)
    return phonenumbers.format_number(phone_representation,
        phonenumbers.PhoneNumberFormat.E164)

print convert_to_e164('212 555 1234')   # prints +12125551234