error with fetching tweets after refresh - php

Question

First of all i want to apologize if this is the most basic question ever! I'm not that good with php but i'm learning.
I can't find a solution or even understand why it's going wrong all the time. I do want to know why this is happening
I'm trying to get the two latest tweets from a twitter account. I don't want to use massive (existing, i know) classes or codes which i don't understand. So i tried the following myself:
$timeline = "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=Mau_ries";
$data = file_get_contents($timeline);
$tweets = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$i = 0;
foreach($tweets as $tweet){
echo($tweet->text." - ".$tweet->created_at);
if (++$i == 2) break;
}
When i first ran this code i got the text from my tweets, but when i refreshed the page i sometimes get the following error:
Warning: file_get_contents(http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=Mau_ries) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request in /path/to/file on line 88
Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Exception' with message 'String could not be parsed as XML' in /public/sites/www.singledays.nl/tmp/index.php:89 Stack trace: #0 /public/sites/www.singledays.nl/tmp/index.php(89): SimpleXMLElement->__construct('') #1 {main} thrown in /path/to/file on line 89
Lines 88 & 89 are these:
$data = file_get_contents($timeline);
$tweets = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
Really weird. Sometimes it work, sometimes not.
Does anybody know this issue and/or a solution? And why does the error seem to occur randomly (Allthough it;s now erroring for a while allready)?
Thanks!

Answer 1

$timeline = "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=Mau_ries";
$data = #file_get_contents($timeline);
if($data){
$fh = fopen("cache/".sha1($timeline),"w");
fwrite($fh, $data);
fclose($fh);
}else{
$fh = #fopen("cache/".sha1($timeline),"r");
$data = "";
while(!feof($fh)){ $data = fread($fh, 1024); }
fclose($fh);
}
if(!$data) die("could not open url or find a cache of url locally");
$tweets = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$i = 0;
foreach($tweets as $tweet){
echo($tweet->text." - ".$tweet->created_at);
if (++$i == 2) break;
}
There as every one has said debugging you should really cache the results in files and if it fails to download then use the cache the above code will do it for you.