UserTweets – A Simple PHP Twitter Class

Blog, PHP

For those that are unfamiliar with the Twitter API or are looking to quickly fetch tweets from a user’s profile, this class will help.

In PHP, all you do is include the class in your document and construct it with a Twitter username (with some options for extra tweaking).

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<?php
class UserTweets
{
  var $username = '';
  var $page_content = '';
  var $encoded_content = array();
  var $results = array();
  var $user_info = array();
  var $result_count = 0;
  var $connected = false;
 
  function __construct($username, $options = array())
  {
    $this->username = $username;
 
    $request_options = array(
      'since_id', 'max_id', 'count', 'page'
    );
 
    $option_set = array();
    $option_string = 'screen_name='.urlencode($username);
 
    if(!empty($options))
    {
      foreach($request_options as $req)
      {
        if(isset($options[$req]))
        {
          $option_set[$req] = $options[$req];
          $option_string .= '&'.$req.'='.urlencode($options[$req]);
        }
      }
    }
 
    $url = 'http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?'.$option_string;
 
    $connection = @curl_init();
 
    if($connection)
    {
      curl_setopt($connection, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
      curl_setopt($connection, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
      curl_setopt($connection, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
      curl_setopt($connection, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 30);
 
      $this->page_content = curl_exec($connection);
 
      curl_close($connection);
 
      $this->connected = true;
    }
    else
    {
      $connection = @file_get_contents($url);
 
      if($connection)
      {
        $this->page_content = $connection;
 
        $this->connected = true;
      }
    }
 
    if($this->connected)
    {
      $this->results = json_decode($this->page_content, true);
      $this->result_count = count($this->results);
      if($this->result_count > 0)
      {
        $this->user_info = $this->results[0]['user'];
        foreach($this->results as &$result)
        {
          unset($result['user']);
        }
      }
    }
  }
}
?>

Usage

To fetch a user’s tweets with default settings (simple method).

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$tweets = new UserTweets('stevedecoded');

Setting options with names and values as defined in the Twitter API Wiki. This example returns 5 results posted on or before the update with ID of 12402600172.

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$options = array(
  'max_id' => 12402600172,
  'count' => 5
);
 
$tweets = new UserTweets('stevedecoded', $options);

Displaying tweets in an ordered list.

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if($tweets->result_count > 0)
{
  echo '<h1>Tweets</h1>';
  echo '<ol>';
  foreach($tweets->results as $tweet)
  {
    echo '<li>'.$tweet['text'].'</li>';
  }
  echo '</ol>';
}

…And user info. This data is stripped out of the results array and added into its own named user_info to reduce bloat.

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if($tweets->result_count > 0)
{
  echo '<h1>User Info</h1>';
  echo '<ol>';
  foreach($tweets->user_info as $name => $info)
  {
    echo '<li>'.$name.' => '.$info.'</li>';
  }
  echo '</ol>';
}

This script will work on server setups with either the cURL library or allow_url_fopen turned on, taking preference over the faster and more secure cURL. If none are in use, most of the object properties will be empty (like results and page_content) and it will handle itself properly without printing errors to the page.

Hope this class will make it a bit easier for developers to start using the great Twitter API in their own mashups.

Comments are welcome as always.

Have fun 🙂

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2 thoughts on “UserTweets – A Simple PHP Twitter Class”

  1. Thanks for posting this. I am trying to establish a more effective twitter approach than javascript calls for each web page in a site and this script is very useful for me to build on. Other libraries are so much over kill – this script is just right!

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