Parsing and Embedding Twitter Feeds in PHP
- April 22nd, 2012
- By كارما
- Write comment
Twitter feeds can be obtained in XML with this URL scheme:
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/$username.xml?count=$count
Where $username is the twitter user’s name and $count is how far back you want to go.
If your environment allows url_fopen you can load the whole thing directly into an object with simplexml_load_file().
Portability is good and allow_url_fopen is arguably very dangerous. For the sake of brevity let’s rip this class from the PHP manual’s fopen() comments:
class HTTPRequest
{
var $_fp; // HTTP socket
var $_url; // full URL
var $_host; // HTTP host
var $_protocol; // protocol (HTTP/HTTPS)
var $_uri; // request URI
var $_port; // port
// scan url
function _scan_url()
{
$req = $this->_url;
$pos = strpos($req, '://');
$this->_protocol = strtolower(substr($req, 0, $pos));
$req = substr($req, $pos+3);
$pos = strpos($req, '/');
if($pos === false)
$pos = strlen($req);
$host = substr($req, 0, $pos);
if(strpos($host, ':') !== false)
{
list($this->_host, $this->_port) = explode(':', $host);
}
else
{
$this->_host = $host;
$this->_port = ($this->_protocol == 'https') ? 443 : 80;
}
$this->_uri = substr($req, $pos);
if($this->_uri == '')
$this->_uri = '/';
}
// constructor
function HTTPRequest($url)
{
$this->_url = $url;
$this->_scan_url();
}
// download URL to string
function DownloadToString()
{
$crlf = "\r\n";
// generate request
$req = 'GET ' . $this->_uri . ' HTTP/1.0' . $crlf
. 'Host: ' . $this->_host . $crlf
. $crlf;
// fetch
$this->_fp = fsockopen(($this->_protocol == 'https' ? 'ssl://' : '') . $this->_host, $this->_port);
fwrite($this->_fp, $req);
while(is_resource($this->_fp) && $this->_fp && !feof($this->_fp))
$response .= fread($this->_fp, 1024);
fclose($this->_fp);
// split header and body
$pos = strpos($response, $crlf . $crlf);
if($pos === false)
return($response);
$header = substr($response, 0, $pos);
$body = substr($response, $pos + 2 * strlen($crlf));
// parse headers
$headers = array();
$lines = explode($crlf, $header);
foreach($lines as $line)
if(($pos = strpos($line, ':')) !== false)
$headers[strtolower(trim(substr($line, 0, $pos)))] = trim(substr($line, $pos+1));
// redirection?
if(isset($headers['location']))
{
$http = new HTTPRequest($headers['location']);
return($http->DownloadToString($http));
}
else
{
return($body);
}
}
}
We also need to give the links anchors, so we’ll modify Jonathan Sampson‘s clever little function to not shorten URLs since twitter already does this for us these days:
function auto_link_text($text)
{
$pattern = '#\b(([\w-]+://?|www[.])[^\s()<>]+(?:\([\w\d]+\)|([^[:punct:]\s]|/)))#';
$callback = create_function('$matches', '
$url = array_shift($matches);
$url_parts = parse_url($url);
$text = parse_url($url, PHP_URL_HOST) . parse_url($url, PHP_URL_PATH);
$text = preg_replace("/^www./", "", $text);
$last = -(strlen(strrchr($text, "/"))) + 1;
return sprintf(\'<a rel="nowfollow" href="%s">%s</a>\', $url, $text);
');
return preg_replace_callback($pattern, $callback, $text);
}
Here we go:
$username = "username";
$count = 5;
$feed = "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/$username.xml?count=$count";
$r = new HTTPRequest($feed);
$tweets = $r->DownloadToString();
$twitter_xml = simplexml_load_string($tweets);
$tweet_data = '';
foreach($twitter_xml->status as $status_object)
{
$tweet_epoch = strtotime($status_object->created_at);
$tweet_data .= "<div class=\"tweet\"><span class=\"tweet_date\">".date("F j g:ia", $tweet_epoch)."</span><div class=\"tweet_message\">".auto_link_text($status_object->text)."</div></div>";
}
print($tweet_data);
