Phil Sturgeon

How to: Create a Twitter feed with full syntax support

Posted PHP at Jul 28, 2009

If you have a project that you would like to add a Twitter feed to, but do not want to add in a massive library for the one feed, try this little snippet of procedural code that I recently implemented on pyrocms.com.

Expressions

Detect URL's

'|([a-z]{3,9}://[a-z0-9-_./?&+]*)|i'
=>
'<a href="$0" target="_blank">$0</a>',

Detect E-mail addresses

'|[a-z0-9._%+-]+@[a-z0-9.-]+.[a-z]{2,6}|i'
=>
'<a href="mailto:$0">$0</a>',

Detect @usernames's

'|@([a-z0-9-_]+)|i'
=>
'<a href="http://twitter.com/$1" target="_blank">$0</a>',

Detect #tags

'|#([a-z0-9-_]+)|i'
=>
'<a href="http://twitter.com/search?q=#$1" target="_blank">$0</a>'

Example

Lets put this together to create a very simple working example.

<?php

// Fetch the Tweets in JSON form and convert to a PHP object                                                                                                           
$tweets = json_decode(
    file_get_contents('http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/philsturgeon.json?count=10')
);

// List all regular expression rules
$patterns = array(
    // Detect URL's
    '|([a-z]{3,9}://[a-z0-9-_./?&+]*)|i'     => '<a href="$0" target="_blank">$0</a>',
    
    // Detect Email
    '|[a-z0-9._%+-]+@[a-z0-9.-]+.[a-z]{2,6}|i' => '<a href="mailto:$0">$0</a>',
    
    // Detect Twitter @usernames
    '|@([a-z0-9-_]+)|i'     => '<a href="http://twitter.com/$1" target="_blank">$0</a>',
    
    // Detect Twitter #tags
    '|#([a-z0-9-_]+)|i'     => '<a href="http://twitter.com/search?q=#$1" target="_blank">$0</a>'
);


// Loop through tweets
foreach($tweets as $tweet)
{
    // Run all rules to replace syntax with HTML
    $tweet->text = preg_replace(array_keys($patterns), array_values($replace), $tweet->text);
    
    // Display the tweet with syntax enabled
    echo '<p><strong>'.date('d/m/Y', strtotime($tweet->created_at)) . '</strong> ' . $tweet->text.'</p>';
}

?>

This is not following perfect coding practices, it will not cache data and might not be the most optimal implementation but I was trying to keep the amount of code low to show the simplicity of how it can be achieved.

Instead of showing a users timeline you can use the same code to show search results with the url:

http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=pyrocms

Now, go forth and tweet!