Get All Twitter Posts of a Specific Hashtag in PHP

I got a response to my article about pulling a Twitter feed into your site with PHP asking how to pull all tweets for a given #hashtag. Here, I have published an example of how to do so... It's not saved into a database, you'll have to do that yourself, but this should be enough to get you started. You can see the code below in action here, searching for the hashtag #yankees.

<?php
$pagetitle = "Pull Twitter Hashtags";
require 'header.inc';

function getTweets($hash_tag) {

    $url = 'http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q='.urlencode($hash_tag) ;
    echo "<p>Connecting to <strong>$url</strong> ...</p>";
    $ch = curl_init($url);
    curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
    $xml = curl_exec ($ch);
    curl_close ($ch);

    //If you want to see the response from Twitter, uncomment this next part out:
    //echo "<p>Response:</p>";
    //echo "<pre>".htmlspecialchars($xml)."</pre>";

    $affected = 0;
    $twelement = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
    foreach ($twelement->entry as $entry) {
        $text = trim($entry->title);
        $author = trim($entry->author->name);
        $time = strtotime($entry->published);
        $id = $entry->id;
        echo "<p>Tweet from ".$author.": <strong>".$text."</strong>  <em>Posted ".date('n/j/y g:i a',$time)."</em></p>";
    }

    return true ;
}

getTweets('#yankees');

echo "<hr /><p>This page is an example for the article <a href=\"http://www.inkplant.com/code/get-twitter-posts-by-hashtag.php\">Get All Twitter Posts of a Specific Hashtag in PHP</a>.</p>" ;

require 'footer.inc';
?>

There are a lot of options with the Twitter Search method. You can find out more by checking out their documentation.

This post was published on Tuesday, May 31st, 2011 by Robert James Reese in the following categories: PHP, Twitter. Before using any of the code or other content in this post, you must read and agree to our Terms & Conditions.

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