Question

I am trying to read twitter timeline with cURL, and for some reason I am unable to use preg_match. Here’s my current code, do you see any issues?

$feed = "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/antonpug.xml?count=3";

function parse_feed($feed) {
    //$matches = Array();
    preg_match_all("/<status>(.*?)<\/status>/", $content[0], $matches);

    return $matches[0];

    //$stepOne = explode("<content type=\"html\">", $feed);
    //$stepTwo = explode("</content>", $stepOne[1]);
    //$tweet = $stepTwo[0];
    //$tweet = htmlspecialchars_decode($tweet,ENT_QUOTES);
    //return $tweet;
}

//Initialize the Curl session
$ch = curl_init();
//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
//Set the URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $feed);
//Execute the fetch
$twitterFeed = curl_exec($ch);
//Close the connection
curl_close($ch);

//$twitterFeed = file_get_contents($feed);
echo(parse_feed($twitterFeed));

Answer 1

I guess the better idea would be to use simplexml to work with XML as with object.
Your function then would be something like

function parse_feed($feed) {
    $xml = simplexml_load_string($feed);
    if(isset($xml->status)) {
        return $xml->xpath('status');
    } else {
        return false;
    }
}

It will return simplexml object.