Question

For a URL I am trying to count it’s tweets through this API request:

http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://www.bbc.co.uk

This (in a Browser) returns the following Json:

{"count":216743,"url":"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/"}

I can manually parse the response:

$tweets = json_decode('{"count":216743,"url":"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/"}');
$this->set('tweets', $tweets->{'count'});

When I enter the URL instead of the Json, it doesn’t request any data. How would I get the following to work?

$tweets = json_decode('http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://www.bbc.co.uk');
$this->set('tweets', $tweets->{'count'});

Answer 1

json_decode expects to get a JSON string. http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://www.bbc.co.uk is not a JSON string, it’s a URL. json_decode does not fetch URLs. You need to fetch the URL yourself, then pass the result to json_decode:

$json = file_get_contents('http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://www.bbc.co.uk');
$tweets = json_decode($json);