Twitter Get User Status values using API and is there a limit? - php

Question

All,
I have the following code to grab a twitter status and display it back to the user:
if( ! $tweet ) {
//$format = 'json';
//$contents = file_get_contents( "http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/{$username}.{$format}", 0, $context );
//$contents = file_get_contents(" https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name={$username}&count={$how_many}", 0, $context );
$url = "http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name={$username}&count={$how_many}";
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 );
$contents = curl_exec( $curl );
curl_close( $curl );
if ( ! empty( $contents ) ) {
// Decode it.
$tweet = json_decode( $contents );
// Cache it for next time.
//set_transient( $id.'-'.$username, $tweet, 60*60*3 ); // 3 hour cache
}
}
// Check to make sure we have a tweet and display it.
if ( is_array($tweet) && isset($tweet[0]->id_str)) {
do_action( 'themeblvd_twitter_slider', $tweet, $options, $username, $slider_id );
} else {
$output = '<span class="tweet-icon '.$options['icon'].'"></span>';
$output .= 'We experienced an error with Twitter! Please check back soon for our reviews!';
}
return $output;
So basically I'm trying to determine if I've already fetched some tweets and if not go fetch them and then pass them back to the loop below to display them to the user.
<?php
foreach($tweet as $t){
?>
<li class="slide tight <?php echo $classes; ?>">
<div class="slide-body">
<div class="grid-protection">
<?php
echo '<span class="tweet-icon '.$options['icon'].'"></span>';
echo '<a href="http://twitter.com/'.$username.'/status/'.$t->id_str.'" target="_blank">';
echo $t->text;
echo '</a>';
?>
</div><!-- .grid-protection (end) -->
</div><!-- .slide-body (end) -->
</li>
<?php
}
?>
For some reason I'm getting the error message saying that they can't be displayed. If I keep the limit to like 10 it displays fairly consistently without an error. If I increase the limit to like 50 or 85 I get the error message saying that twitter is having a problem. Has the API changed recently? Do they have new limits? Any ideas on why I can't display the 85 tweets?
Thanks in advace!

Answer 1

I found out that you can actually determine if you've reached your limit yet or not but calling the following URL:
https://api.twitter.com//1/account/rate_limit_status.json
What I did was check the response in this before actually trying to call the user status API. My code to check the rate limit looks like the following:
$url_check_limit = "https://api.twitter.com//1/account/rate_limit_status.json";
$curl_limit = curl_init();
curl_setopt( $curl_limit, CURLOPT_URL, $url_check_limit );
curl_setopt( $curl_limit, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 );
$contents_limit = curl_exec( $curl_limit );
curl_close( $curl_limit );
if ( ! empty( $contents_limit ) ) {
// Decode it.
$tweet_limit = json_decode( $contents_limit );
}
if ( $tweet_limit->remaining_hits == "0" ){
$no_tweets = true;
echo "We've reached out rate limit";
}else{
//Execute the Twitter user_status API from my original question
}
This allows me to avoid keep calling the twitter API if I hit my limit already. If I didn't hit my limit I call the code in my original question and display the tweets to the user. Hope this helps someone!