Use PHP to cache and display your tweeted links

Written by Brian Cray on August 21st, 2009

This PHP tutorial fetches your last 10 tweets containing links using the Twitter Search API, then displays them in an unordered list (<ul>). It requires PHP 5.2.0 or above to use PHP's built-in JSON functions.

As an added benefit it stores the fetched tweets in a local cache to keep from running into the API limit and links URLs and Twitter usernames so users can click them. Pretty nifty, eh?

Let's get to the code.

// the function
function get_twitter()
{
    $tweets = 10;
    $username = 'briancray';
    
    $url = 'http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=' . urlencode('from:' . $username . ' filter:links') . '&rpp=' . $tweets;
    $cache = dirname(__FILE__) . '/caches/twitter';
    
    if(filemtime($cache) < (time() - 60))
    {
        mkdir(dirname(__FILE__) . '/caches', 0777);
        $ch = curl_init();
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 30);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 5);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
        $data = curl_exec($ch);
        curl_close($ch);
        $cachefile = fopen($cache, 'wb');
        fwrite($cachefile, $data);
        fclose($cachefile);
    }
    else
    {
        $data = file_get_contents($cache);
    }
    $json = json_decode($data);
    
    $html = '<ul>';
    foreach($json->results as $item)
    {
        $item->text = preg_replace('/(https?:\/\/[a-zA-Z\-0-9\.\/]+)[^a-zA-Z\-0-9\.\/]?/', '<a href="\\1" target="_blank">\\1</a>', $item->text);
        $item->text = preg_replace('/@(\w+)\b/', '@<a href="http://twitter.com/\\1" target="_blank">\\1</a>', $item->text);
        $html .= '<li>' . $item->text . '</li>';
    }
    $html .= '</ul>';
    return $html;
}

// to display them:
echo get_twitter();