How to perform a search query using Services_Twitter? - php

Question

I am trying to perform a Twitter search using the PEAR package Services_Twitter.
Unfortunately this only returns an array of status ids, for example (var_dump):
object(stdClass)#88 (2) {
["statuses"]=>
array(11) {
[0]=>
int(49497593539)
[1]=>
int(49497593851)
[2]=>
int(49497598001)
[3]=>
int(49497599055)
[4]=>
int(49497599597)
[5]=>
int(49497600733)
[6]=>
int(49497602607)
[7]=>
int(49497607031)
[8]=>
int(49497607453)
[9]=>
int(49497609577)
[10]=>
int(49497610605)
}
["created_in"]=>
float(0.008847)
}
The script I'm using is similar to this test script I wrote:
<?php
//$oAuth = new HTTP_OAuth_Consumer( /** Supply oAuth details here **/ );
$Twitter = new Services_Twitter();
//$Twitter->setOAuth($oAuth);
try {
$Response = $Twitter->search(array(
"q" => "#FF -RT OR #FollowFriday -RT",
"rpp" => 10,
"since_id" => 23982086000,
"result_type" => "recent"
));
var_dump($Response);
} catch (Exception $e) {
fwrite(STDERR, $e->getMessage());
}
?>
Since I want to scan the tweets for certain words and want to know when it was posted and by whom, I would need to request all these statuses one by one.
But according to the example response in the Twitter API documentation they already return all the necessary information about the tweets (which is kinda obvious).
So, the question is: How can I access this information using Services_Twitter?
Kind Regards,
Arno

Answer 1

So as I said ->search() is wrapped through Services_Twitter::__call().
But here's the mis-understanding!
Two searches:
http://api.twitter.com/1/search.json?q=#noradio
http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=#noradio
This is confusing as search.twitter.com returns the results as you'd expect them and the other API method just the status IDs.
For some reason only when you search for trends search.twitter.com is used. Otherwise it's the API methods. If you want to help, please open a ticket on PEAR and I can try to implement this for you.
A quickfix for you is this script:
<?php
$uri = 'http://search.twitter.com/search.json?';
$uri .= http_build_query(
array(
"q" => "#FF -RT OR #FollowFriday -RT",
"rpp" => 10,
"since_id" => 23982086000,
"result_type" => "recent"
));
$response = file_get_contents($uri);
if ($response === false) {
fwrite(STDERR, "Could not fetch search result.");
exit(1);
}
$data = json_decode($response);
var_dump($data);

Answer 2

Are you using a custom Services_Twitter, I just did a search through the class via Pear Documentation and was unable to find the search function. However, it seems like most of the returns for that class is a simple_xml object. Given that I would look through the documentation there and see how you can pull that data out. It would also help looking at how Twitter returns the response in XML format.