Question

I am using twitters search API to view all the tweets that use a particular hashtag I want to view.

However, I want to use the stream function, so, I only get recent ones, and so, I can then store them.

  <?php
        global $total, $hashtag;
        $hashtag = $_POST['hash'];
        $total = 0;
        function getTweets($hash_tag, $page) {
              global $total, $hashtag;
              $url = 'http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q='.urlencode($hash_tag).'&';
              $url .= 'page='.$page;    
              $ch = curl_init($url);
              curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
              $json = curl_exec ($ch);
              curl_close ($ch);
              echo "<pre>";    
              $json_decode = json_decode($json);
              print_r($json_decode->results);

              $json_decode = json_decode($json);        
              $total += count($json_decode->results);    
              if($json_decode->next_page){
                   $temp = explode("&",$json_decode->next_page);        
                   $p = explode("=",$temp[0]);                
                   getTweets($hashtag,$p[1]);
              }        
        }

        getTweets($hashtag,1);
        echo $total;
  ?>

The above code is what I have been using to search for the tweets I want.

What do I need to do to change it so I can stream the tweets instead?

I know I would have to use the stream url https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json ,
but what do I need to change after that is where I don’t know what to do.

Obviously, I know I’ll need to write the database sql but I want to just capture the stream first and view it.

How would I do this? Is the code I have been using not any good for just capturing the stream?

Answer 1

It seems to be impossible to use the stream API to get hashtags.

Using the search API is pretty much the only solution. Just use an AJAX content refresh to get all new tweets. The overall effect is pretty much the same unless you want to store the tweets in a database in which case to have to prevent duplicates being save.