How to: Create a Twitter feed with full syntax support
Written by: Phil Sturgeon
Hello, I am Phil and I have been developing websites since 1999. I started my career freelancing then ran a small web development team for over a year. Now I work as a developer for HargreavesLansdown and use my spare time to develop, write articles about programming and create slightly intoxicated screencasts. For more of my antics follow me on twitter @PhilSturgeon.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(
'|([a-z]{3,9}://[a-z0-9-_./?&+]*)|i' => '$0', // Detect URL's
'|[a-z0-9._%+-]+@[a-z0-9.-]+.[a-z]{2,6}|i' => '$0', // Detect Email Addresses
'|@([a-z0-9-_]+)|i' => '$0', // Detect Twitter @usernames
'|#([a-z0-9-_]+)|i' => '$0' // Detect Twitter #tags
);
// Loop through tweets
foreach($tweets as $tweet)
{
// Run all rules to replace syntax with HTML
$tweet->text = preg_replace(array_keys($patterns), array_values($replace), $tweet->text);
// Display the tweet with syntax enabled
echo '
'.date('d/m/Y', strtotime($tweet->created_at)) . ' ' . $tweet->text.'
';
}
?>
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!
Tags: feeds, json, phil sturgeon, PHP, pyrocms, twitter
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