Hi, a quick google found this post for stripping html strings:
which seems like it might help with one bit of your question?
Another quick google for "python strings to upper case" pulled this back
so you'd want to change:
scrollphat.write_string(tweet)
to
scrollphat.write_string(tweet.upper())
As for the scrolling once, it's very hard to follow your code with the formatting above, I'd suggest pushing to somewhere like github and providing a link as that formats code quite well in a webpage and allows cutting and pasting of links to specific lines, and that might make it easier for someone to understand your code and give you some more pointers :)
