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I asked a co-worker today if he ever used twitter. His response was “No, I have friends.” The feeling was mutual, however twitter seems very popular and its been a while since I’ve played around with an API. So I created a twitter account, and then began looking through the API documentation. I was happy to see they had support for JSON.

Its been a while since I played around with an API so I decided to dust of my web development API skills and create a Twitter class written to work in PHP 5.2.1. This class uses the native support for JSON, but I did include a bit of (untested) code for those of you using a sub par version of PHP. Just edit the include path for the JSON.php file and it should work. The file I’ve provided is a PHPS file, so you will need to chop the S of the end of the file name for it to work.

Download Twitter.class.php

Here is an example of using the class:

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include_once('Twitter.class.php');
 
$twitter = new Twitter();
// it takes an array of search terms incase you want to search for a lot of stuff
$twitter->set_searchTermArr(array('twitter','obama','new york giants')); 
$twitter->search();
$array = $twitter->get_searchResultArr();
 
	foreach($array as $a)
	{
		if($a->results!=0)
		{
			echo 'twitter results for "'.$a->query.'"';
			foreach($a->results as $i)
			{
				echo $i->text.' user: '.$i->from_user.' created: '.$i->created_at;
			}
		}
	}

Now for updating your twitter account:

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	$twitter->set_username('username');
	$twitter->set_password('password');
	$twitter->update('using twitter api to update this');

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 2:01 am and is filed under php. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.