Using the Twitter Search API

Posted on January 30, 2009 by Ashley

Twitters new search feature is great for finding interesting people and topics to follow. So i wrote a script to get search results from twitter and display them on your site. This could be integrated into an existing application or used standalone to follow a particular topic or keyword on twitter,Â Check the Demo.

The script uses PHP and CURL to get the twitter search results to display them on the page. for the demo i’ve set an if statement to display results for ‘papermashup.com’ if no get variable is present.

Here’s the code that allows us to enter our search term, on submit it posts a get variable to the URL which PHP then processes with CURL.

<div id="search">
<form action="" method="get">
  <label>
  Search twitter
  <input type="text" name="q" id="searchbox" />
  <input type="submit" name="submit" id="submit" value="Search" />
  </label>
</form>
</div>

So we use PHP, CURL, and the SimpleXMLElement() class in PHP5 to parse the XML file. Once we have the xml data, regular expression is used to find the links in the xml content element, which is then saved in $description.

The Code:


// Date function (this could be included in a seperate script to keep it clean)
function date_diff($d1, $d2){
	$d1 = (is_string($d1) ? strtotime($d1) : $d1);
	$d2 = (is_string($d2) ? strtotime($d2) : $d2);

	$diff_secs = abs($d1 - $d2);
	$base_year = min(date("Y", $d1), date("Y", $d2));

	$diff = mktime(0, 0, $diff_secs, 1, 1, $base_year);
	$diffArray = array(
		"years" => date("Y", $diff) - $base_year,
		"months_total" => (date("Y", $diff) - $base_year) * 12 + date("n", $diff) - 1,
		"months" => date("n", $diff) - 1,
		"days_total" => floor($diff_secs / (3600 * 24)),
		"days" => date("j", $diff) - 1,
		"hours_total" => floor($diff_secs / 3600),
		"hours" => date("G", $diff),
		"minutes_total" => floor($diff_secs / 60),
		"minutes" => (int) date("i", $diff),
		"seconds_total" => $diff_secs,
		"seconds" => (int) date("s", $diff)
	);
	if($diffArray['days'] > 0){
		if($diffArray['days'] == 1){
			$days = '1 day';
		}else{
			$days = $diffArray['days'] . ' days';
		}
		return $days . ' and ' . $diffArray['hours'] . ' hours ago';
	}else if($diffArray['hours'] > 0){
		if($diffArray['hours'] == 1){
			$hours = '1 hour';
		}else{
			$hours = $diffArray['hours'] . ' hours';
		}
		return $hours . ' and ' . $diffArray['minutes'] . ' minutes ago';
	}else if($diffArray['minutes'] > 0){
		if($diffArray['minutes'] == 1){
			$minutes = '1 minute';
		}else{
			$minutes = $diffArray['minutes'] . ' minutes';
		}
		return $minutes . ' and ' . $diffArray['seconds'] . ' seconds ago';
	}else{
		return 'Less than a minute ago';
	}
}

// Work out the Date plus 8 hours
// get the current timestamp into an array
$timestamp = time();
$date_time_array = getdate($timestamp);

$hours = $date_time_array['hours'];
$minutes = $date_time_array['minutes'];
$seconds = $date_time_array['seconds'];
$month = $date_time_array['mon'];
$day = $date_time_array['mday'];
$year = $date_time_array['year'];

// use mktime to recreate the unix timestamp
// adding 19 hours to $hours
$timestamp = mktime($hours + 0,$minutes,$seconds,$month,$day,$year);
$theDate = strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S',$timestamp);	

// END DATE FUNCTION

//Search API Script

$q=$_GET['q'];

if($_GET['q']==''){

$q = 'papermashup.com';}

$search = "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=".$q."";

$tw = curl_init();

curl_setopt($tw, CURLOPT_URL, $search);
curl_setopt($tw, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
$twi = curl_exec($tw);
$search_res = new SimpleXMLElement($twi);

echo "<h3>Twitter search results for '".$q."'</h3>";

## Echo the Search Data

foreach ($search_res->entry as $twit1) {

$description = $twit1->content;

$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);

$retweet = strip_tags($description);

$date =  strtotime($twit1->updated);
$dayMonth = date('d M', $date);
$year = date('y', $date);
$message = $row['content'];
$datediff = date_diff($theDate, $date);

echo "<div class='user'><a href=\"",$twit1->author->uri,"\" target=\"_blank\"><img border=\"0\" width=\"48\" class=\"twitter_thumb\" src=\"",$twit1->link[1]->attributes()->href,"\" title=\"", $twit1->author->name, "\" /></a>\n";
echo "<div class='text'>".$description."<div class='description'>From: ", $twit1->author->name," <a href='http://twitter.com/home?status=RT: ".$retweet."' target='_blank'>Retweet!</a></div><strong>".$datediff."</strong></div><div class='clear'></div></div>";

}

curl_close($tw);

UPDATE 25/03/09: i’ve added a re-tweet button which simply opens twitter putting the update in your status window.

UPDATE 26/04/09: As requested by @vincent below. I’ve added a time function which works out how long ago a tweet was posted