PHP Twitter API search/tweets GET tweets from last hour ONLY - php

Question

Hi I have been looking around on the internet and haven't been able to find a solution yet. I want to only get the tweets from the past hour which have a certain hashtag.
I am pulling the tweets in with that hashtag but I dont know how to only get the ones from the past hour.
Here is some example data:
As you can see there is a created_at date there but I dont know how to use this to get the ones from the past hour. I think this would be the only way that I would be able to do it.
The best way I can think of doing it is converting that date into a UNIX timestamp and then checking if it was tweets in the last hour. But there is a lot of data to go through and this doesnt seem like a very good solution but its all I cant think of.
If that is the only solution there is, would some given me an example on how to convert that date to a UNIX timestamp in PHP. If you have a different solution I would love to see a detailed example :) Thanks
You may also find this link useful https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/search/api-reference/get-search-tweets

Answer 1

I couldn't find an alternative solution neither so I coded it. The WINDOW constant defines the time interval to 1 hour. Hope it helps!
<?php
//Access token & access token secret
define("TOKEN", 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'); //Access token
define("TOKEN_SECRET", 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'); //Access token secret
//Consumer API keys
define("CONSUMER_KEY", 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'); //API key
define("CONSUMER_SECRET", 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'); //API secret key
$method='GET';
$host='api.twitter.com';
$path='/1.1/search/tweets.json'; //API call path
$url="https://$host$path";
//Query parameters
$query = array(
'q' => 'wordtosearch', /* Word to search */
'count' => '100', /* Specifies a maximum number of tweets you want to get back, up to 100. As you have 100 API calls per hour only, you want to max it */
'result_type' => 'recent', /* Return only the most recent results in the response */
'include_entities' => 'false' /* Saving unnecessary data */
);
//time window in hours
define("WINDOW", 1);
//Authentication
$oauth = array(
'oauth_consumer_key' => CONSUMER_KEY,
'oauth_token' => TOKEN,
'oauth_nonce' => (string)mt_rand(), //A stronger nonce is recommended
'oauth_timestamp' => time(),
'oauth_signature_method' => 'HMAC-SHA1',
'oauth_version' => '1.0'
);
//Used in Twitter's demo
function add_quotes($str) { return '"'.$str.'"'; }
//Searchs Twitter for a word and get a couple of results
function twitter_search($query, $oauth, $url){
global $method;
$arr=array_merge($oauth, $query); //Combine the values THEN sort
asort($arr); //Secondary sort (value)
ksort($arr); //Primary sort (key)
$querystring=http_build_query($arr,'','&');
//Mash everything together for the text to hash
$base_string=$method."&".rawurlencode($url)."&".rawurlencode($querystring);
//Same with the key
$key=rawurlencode(CONSUMER_SECRET)."&".rawurlencode(TOKEN_SECRET);
//Generate the hash
$signature=rawurlencode(base64_encode(hash_hmac('sha1', $base_string, $key, true)));
//This time we're using a normal GET query, and we're only encoding the query params (without the oauth params)
$url=str_replace("&","&",$url."?".http_build_query($query));
$oauth['oauth_signature'] = $signature; //Don't want to abandon all that work!
ksort($oauth); //Probably not necessary, but twitter's demo does it
$oauth=array_map("add_quotes", $oauth); //Also not necessary, but twitter's demo does this too
//This is the full value of the Authorization line
$auth="OAuth ".urldecode(http_build_query($oauth, '', ', '));
//If you're doing post, you need to skip the GET building above and instead supply query parameters to CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS
$options=array( CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array("Authorization: $auth"),
//CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => $postfields,
CURLOPT_HEADER => false,
CURLOPT_URL => $url,
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => false);
//Query Twitter API
$feed=curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($feed, $options);
$json=curl_exec($feed);
curl_close($feed);
//Return decoded response
return json_decode($json);
};
//Initializing
$done = false; //Loop flag
$countCalls=0; //Api Calls
$countTweets=0; //Tweets fetched
$intervalTweets=0; //Tweets in the last WINDOW hour
$twitter_data = new stdClass();
$now=new DateTime(date('D M j H:i:s O Y')); //Current search time
//Fetching starts
do{
$twitter_data = twitter_search($query,$oauth,$url);
$countCalls+=1;
//Partial results, updating the total amount of tweets fetched
$countTweets += count($twitter_data->statuses);
//Searching for tweets inside the time window
foreach($twitter_data->statuses as $tweet){
$time=new DateTime($tweet->created_at);
$interval = $time->diff($now);
$days=$interval->format('%a');
$hours=$interval->h;
$mins=$interval->i;
$secs=$interval->s;
$diff=$days*24 + $hours + $mins/60 + $secs/3600;
if($diff<WINDOW){
$intervalTweets+=1;
}else{
$done = true;
break;
}
}
//If not all the tweets have been fetched, then redo...
if(!$done && isset($twitter_data->search_metadata->next_results)){
//Parsing information for max_id in tweets fetched
$string="?max_id=";
$parse=explode("&",$twitter_data->search_metadata->next_results);
$maxID=substr($parse[0],strpos($parse[0],$string)+strlen($string));
$query['max_id'] = -1+$maxID; //Returns results with an ID less than (that is, older than) or equal to the specified ID, to avoid getting the same last tweet
//Twitter will be queried again, this time with the addition of 'max_id'
}else{
$done = true;
}
}while(!$done);
//If all the tweets have been fetched, then we are done
echo "<p>query: ".urldecode($query['q'])."</p>";
echo "<p>tweets fetched: ".$countTweets."</p>";
echo "<p>API calls: ".$countCalls."</p>";
echo "<p>tweets in the last ".WINDOW." hour: ".$intervalTweets."</p>";
?>