mygeekpal

How to display your twitter follower count using PHP

Got over 1000 followers on twitter? And you want to flaunt your twitter follower count proudly on your blog. The following PHP code is a  PHP cURL code implementation to pull out the twitter followers using REST API. It will get you the number of followers on twitter using the cURL library. Just change the $screen_name and the script is pretty self explanatory. The code is tested working, You are free to do anything with this code, I take no responsibility further however you can ask me for support. I will try to help you out if I can.

NOTE: The code won't work for an hour if you 100 API calls per hours are completed.

<?
// get the number of followers

$screen_name = "atif089";       // dont forget to chagne your username
$html = process("http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?screen_name=$screen_name");

// Parse the number of followers
$pattern = '<followers_count>(.*)<\/followers_count>';
ereg($pattern, $html, $matches);

// change this HTML as per your requirement
echo "<a href=\"http://twitter.com/$screen_name\">Follow me on twitter: (".$matches[1]." followers)</a>";

/**
 * process : This method open a URL via cURL library
 *
 * @param string $url (must) This is the URL that you would like to open
 * @param string $postargs (optional) Any arguments that you would like to send via POST method
 *
 */

 function process($url,$postargs=false){
 $ch = curl_init($url);
 if($postargs !== false){
 curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
 curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postargs);
 }
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060215 Firefox/3.0.11");
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION,1);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
 $response = curl_exec($ch);
 curl_close($ch);
 return $response;
 }
?>