Read tweets using PHP - php

Question

I have a small problem with my tweets script. But for some reason, I don't know what the error could be. This is the error it gives me:
$url = "http://www.twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/{$username}.xml?count={$number}";
$tweets = file_get_contents($url);
$feed = new SimpleXMLElement($tweets);
function time_stamp($date){
if (empty($date)){
return "No date provided";
}
and on the index.php page, it'll show this code:
<?php
$username = "user";//your twitter username
$number = 3;//number of tweets
include ("{$dir}/php/tweets.php");
?>
Do you guys know what it is that I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

You don't need file_get_contents()
Try:
$url = "http://www.twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/{$username}.xml?count={$number}";
$feed = simplexml_load_file($url);
Also, twitter made some changes not too long ago so your URL needs to look like this:
$url = "http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/{$username}.xml?count={$number}";
Check this discussion.

Answer 2

You can use JSON easy and faster than XML
And to get content you can use
Curl => Faster
or
File_get_contents
Url
https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?include_entities=true&include_rts=true&screen_name={screenname}&count={count}
like this
<?php
$url = 'https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?include_entities=true&include_rts=true&screen_name=abdullaheid&count=3'
$x = file_get_contents( $url ) ; // Using file get contents
$object = json_decode( $x ) ;
$array = (array) $object ;
print_r( $array ) ;
?>