Using the Twitter API

TWITTER HAS CHANGED ITS API METHOD THIS TUTORIAL WILL NO LONGER WORK.

Here’s a simple introduction on using the Twitter API. The API offers many different ways to connect to your details including xml, json, atom, and rss. Im going to use xml, php and curl to read an xml file to get my latest followers tweets and display them in the format below.

This method of parsing the xml file requires PHP5 and uses the SimpleXMLElement class.

The Code

$login = "username:password";

$tweets = "http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml?count=5";

$tw = curl_init();

curl_setopt($tw, CURLOPT_URL, $tweets);

curl_setopt($tw, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $login);

curl_setopt($tw, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);

$twi = curl_exec($tw);

$tweeters = new SimpleXMLElement($twi);

$latesttweets = count($tweeters);

if ($latesttweets>2) {

	echo "<h3>".$latesttweets." latest tweets from the users I follow | <a href=\"http://www.twitter.com/ashleyford\">Follow Me!</a></h3>";

	}

## Printing/Dumping the data

foreach ($tweeters->status as $twit1) {

$description = $twit1->text;

      $description = preg_replace("#(^|[\n ])@([^ \"\t\n\r<]*)#ise", "'\\1<a href=\"http://www.twitter.com/\\2\" >@\\2</a>'", $description);
$description = preg_replace("#(^|[\n ])([\w]+?://[\w]+[^ \"\n\r\t<]*)#ise", "'\\1<a href=\"\\2\" >\\2</a>'", $description);
$description = preg_replace("#(^|[\n ])((www|ftp)\.[^ \"\t\n\r<]*)#ise", "'\\1<a href=\"http://\\2\" >\\2</a>'", $description);

echo "<div class='user'><a href=\"http://www.twitter.com/", $twit1->user->screen_name,"\" target=\"_blank\"><img border=\"0\" class=\"twitter_followers\" src=\"", $twit1->user->profile_image_url, "\" title=\"", $twit1->name, "\" /></a>\n";
echo "<div class='name'>", $twit1->user->name,"</div>";
echo "<div class='followers'>", $twit1->user->location,"</div>";
echo "<div class='location'>", $twit1->user->url,"</div>";
echo "<div class='text'>".$description."<div class='description'>From ", $twit1->source,"</div></div></div>";}

curl_close($tw);

The first thing you need to do to connect to the API is to add your login details in the variable $login, this is required to authenticate the connection to the API. Next we specify which xml file we want to get data from in our case we’re targeting the friends_timeline: http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml?count=5 at the end i’ve appended a parameter that limits the number of results to 5, you can change this to anything up to 20.

Then using curl we can authenticate the connection and parse the xml file using the SimpleXMLElement class in PHP5. Then we cycle through the results in a ‘foreach’ loop and display the results on the page. you can then style it with CSS.

UPDATE:

To enable @reply links and tiny url links in your updates i have added regular expression, the new code is above, i have also updated the demo

you can change the xml file, to target different user data, you may have to tweek the code to point to the correct xml tags. Here is a list of xml files to play with.

Twitter Public Timeline.

http://twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline.xml

Users Timeline.

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml

Shows a users @replies

http://twitter.com/statuses/replies.xml

Shows a users friends list up to 100 (with most recent tweet)

http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.xml