Articles » Display latest Twitter tweets with PHP

Earlier this year we wrote an article showing a PHP function to display latest Twitter tweet. While that works well for displaying a single tweet we recently needed to display the latest 5 Twitter tweets on our website. The code below shows a simple way to do this.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
< ?php
$doc = new DOMDocument();
 
# load the RSS document, edit this line to include your username or user id
if($doc->load('http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/yourUserName.rss')) {
	
	# specify the number of tweets to display, max is 20
	$max_tweets = 5;    
	
	$i = 1;
	foreach ($doc->getElementsByTagName('item') as $node) {
		# fetch the title from the RSS feed. 
		# Note: 'pubDate' and 'link' are also useful (I use them in the sidebar of this blog)
		$tweet = $node->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue;
		
		# the title of each tweet starts with "username: " which I want to remove
		$tweet = substr($tweet, stripos($tweet, ':') + 1);   
		
		# OPTIONAL: turn URLs into links
		$tweet = preg_replace('@(https?://([-\w\.]+)+(:\d+)?(/([\w/_\.]*(\?\S+)?)?)?)@', '<a href="$1">$1</a>', $tweet);
		
		# OPTIONAL: turn @replies into links
		$tweet = preg_replace("/@([0-9a-zA-Z]+)/", "<a href=\"http://twitter.com/$1\">@$1</a>", $tweet);
		
		echo "<li>".$tweet."</li>\n";
		
		if ($i++ >= $max_tweets)
			break;
	}
	echo "</ul>\n";
} 
?>



Captcha Image