Twitter Search API - Popular tweets not working - php

Question

I am experiencing an issue with the Twitter Search API. I am trying to grab the total amount of retweets for the 100 most popular tweets, for the subject the user gives.
I am trying to achieve this with this code.
<?php
//Debugging
ini_set('display_errors', 'On');
error_reporting(E_ALL);
//Include Tokens file
require_once('tokens.php');
//Include Auth lib
require_once('twitterAuth/TwitterAPIExchange.php');
//Grab subject from url
$subject = $_GET["subject"];
//Request
$url = 'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json';
$getfield = '?q='.$subject.'&count=100&result_type=popular';
$requestMethod = 'GET';
$twitter = new TwitterAPIExchange($settings);
$result = $twitter->setGetfield($getfield)
->buildOauth($url, $requestMethod)
->performRequest();
$json_output = json_decode($result, true); //getting the file content as array
$count = 0;
$total = 0;
foreach($json_output['statuses'] as $tweets) {
$count = intval($tweets['retweet_count']);
$total = $total + $count;
}
echo '{"data":[{"retweet_count":'.$total.'}]}';
?>
While this code is working great when I use result_type=mixed or result_type=recent, it will, for some reason, not work when I change it to result_type=popular even-though the Twitter API has listed as an option in their documentation. Twitter Search API documentation . It doesn't return any errors when I run the request, it doesn't show any feedback. When I replace popular with mixed or recent, the code works excellent. Been stuck on this for a while, help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I think this will depend heavily on what you search for. The Twitter search API only lets you retrieve Tweets from the past week. If there were no popular tweets for that week, you won't see any results.
For example - a search for "Android" shows these popular results
https://snap.apigee.com/1KlHi9m
But if I search for "qwertyuiop" there are no results from the API
https://snap.apigee.com/1ZT56wV
Even though a normal Twitter search shows results https://twitter.com/search?q=qwertyuiop&src=typd