Twitter & PHP

[falkencreative]

OK, so I've been working on a simple script that pulls my twitter status/time posted from twitter.com and displays it in my website. Here is the code that I have so far:

 

// http://twitter.pbwiki.com/RelativeTimeScripts
function get_elapsedtime($time) {
   $gap = time() - $time;
   if ($gap         return 'less than 5 seconds ago';
   } else if ($gap         return 'less than 10 seconds ago';
   } else if ($gap         return 'less than 20 seconds ago';
   } else if ($gap         return 'half a minute ago';
   } else if ($gap         return 'less than a minute ago';
   }
   $gap = round($gap / 60);
   if ($gap         return $gap.' minute'.($gap > 1 ? 's' : '').' ago';
   }
   $gap = round($gap / 60);
   if ($gap         return 'about '.$gap.' hour'.($gap > 1 ? 's' : '').' ago';
   }
   return date('h:i A F d, Y', $time);
}

function twitter_status($username) {

   $twitter_url = "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/$username.xml?count=1";
   $buffer = file_get_contents($twitter_url);    
   $xml = new SimpleXMLElement($buffer);
   $status_item = $xml -> status;
   $status =  $status_item -> text;
   $created_at = get_elapsedtime(strtotime($status_item -> created_at));

   return "\"$status\"
$created_at";
}

$twitter = twitter_status("falkencreative"); 

This works... as long as I can access my Twitter account. It looks like after 100 requests in an hour, the script dies with this PHP error and causes most of my page to stop displaying:

 

[30-Dec-2008 13:12:46] PHP Warning: file_get_contents(http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/falkencreative.xml?count=1) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request

in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/Ver 2.0/Development/resources/includes/incl_functions.php on line 66

[30-Dec-2008 13:12:46] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Exception' with message 'String could not be parsed as XML' in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/Ver 2.0/Development/resources/includes/incl_functions.php:67

Stack trace:

#0 /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/Ver 2.0/Development/resources/includes/incl_functions.php(67): SimpleXMLElement->__construct('')

#1 /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/Ver 2.0/Development/resources/includes/incl_sidebar.php(8): twitter_status()

#2 /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/Ver 2.0/Development/portfolio.php(110): include('/Applications/M...')

#3 {main}

thrown in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/Ver 2.0/Development/resources/includes/incl_functions.php on line 67

 

Line 67 is this line: "$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($buffer);"

 

Regularly, the XML that should be returned is this:

 

?

Tue Dec 30 21:37:30 +0000 2008
1086676756
OK, just populating my portfolio left...
?

twitterrific

false


false

?

9250782
Benjamin Falk
falkencreative
Orange County, CA
?

Benjamin Falk | student, designer and frontend developer.

?

http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/57732233/getavatar_normal.jpeg

http://www.falkencreative.com
false
16

 

But when I get the error, this is what I get:

 

/statuses/user_timeline/falkencreative.xml?count=1
?

Rate limit exceeded. Clients may not make more than 100 requests per hour.

 

Is there any way I could add some sort of error checking (perhaps through try/catch?) to catch the error and return an error message, instead of generating the PHP error? I've tried playing around with it myself, but it's going over my head.

[administrator]

You should be able to wrap the function call in a try/catch and then set it to catch any error. This way, you can display a nice friendly message to users.

 

If you knew the twitter API, you could get a list of errors it throws, then create a more fine-tuned error handling routine. If not, just do a catch all and you should be fine.

 

Stefan

[falkencreative]

Here's what I eventually settled on... based mostly on a code sample from http://abeautifulsite.net/notebook.php?article=75

 

-- Caches the tweets, refreshes the cache every 10 minutes (reduces load on Twitter.com, which only allows 100 calls per hour)

-- parses URLs properly, and if the tweet includes a URL, adds the link

-- Includes the time the tweet was posted, in a "two minutes ago" or "two hours ago" type format, rather than an exact time

-- Includes basic error checking

 

The object gets accessed like this:

 

$gettwitter = new twitter('twitterid#here');
echo $gettwitter->getStatus();

 

Class:

 

class twitter{
   const CACHE_FNAME = 'resources/twitter.status';

   function __construct($id,$addAnchors=true) {
       $this->id = $id;
       $this->addAnchors = $addAnchors;
       $this->status = $this->load();
   }

   private function load() {
       $ret = '';

       $life = (time() - filectime(self::CACHE_FNAME));
       if($life  0)
           $ret = trim(file_get_contents(self::CACHE_FNAME));

       return $ret;
   }

   private function save() {
       file_put_contents(self::CACHE_FNAME,$this->status);
   }

   function getStatus() {
       // fetch new status
       if(!strlen($this->status)){
           $this->status = $this->fetch();
           $this->save();
       }

       return $this->status;
   }

   // http://twitter.pbwiki.com/RelativeTimeScripts
   function get_elapsedtime($time) {
       $gap = time() - $time;
       if ($gap             return 'less than 5 seconds ago';
       } else if ($gap             return 'less than 10 seconds ago';
       } else if ($gap             return 'less than 20 seconds ago';
       } else if ($gap             return 'half a minute ago';
       } else if ($gap             return 'less than a minute ago';
       }
       $gap = round($gap / 60);
       if ($gap             return $gap.' minute'.($gap > 1 ? 's' : '').' ago';
       }
       $gap = round($gap / 60);
       if ($gap             return 'about '.$gap.' hour'.($gap > 1 ? 's' : '').' ago';
       }
       return date('h:i A F d, Y', $time);
   }

   private function fetch() {
       // init
       $c = curl_init();
       curl_setopt($c,CURLOPT_URL,"http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/$this->id.xml");
       curl_setopt($c,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);

       // exec
       $src = curl_exec($c);
       curl_close($c);
       preg_match('/(.*)/',$src,$m);
       $status = @htmlentities($m[1]);

       // check for errors, in case request is over 100 request limit
       if(!$status) { return "Error: Error connecting to Twitter!"; }

       // add anchors?
       if($this->addAnchors)
       $status = ereg_replace("[[:alpha:]]+://[^[:space:]]+[[:alnum:]/]","\\0",$status);

       // get time
       preg_match('/(.*)/',$src,$m);
       $created_at = $this->get_elapsedtime(strtotime($m[1]));

       return $status . "
" . $created_at;
   }
}

?>

[shelfimage]

There are a couple plugins for cmsms to feed your tweets too.