Question

I have a simple search bar, user types in a search terms and tweets that match the search terms should show up. However, it only works for single word searches.

<div id="search">
<form action="" method="get">
  <label>
  Search:
  <input type="text" name="search_box" id="search_box" />
  <input type="submit" name="submit" id="submit" value="Search" />
  </label>
</form>
</div>

<?php 


$q=$_GET['search_box'];

$search = "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=".$q."";

$tw = curl_init();

curl_setopt($tw, CURLOPT_URL, $search);
curl_setopt($tw, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
$twi = curl_exec($tw);
$search_res = new SimpleXMLElement($twi);

echo "<h3>Twitter search results for '".$q."'</h3>";

foreach ($search_res->entry as $twit1) {

$description = $twit1->content;

$message = $row['content'];

echo "<div class='text'>".$description."</div><br><br>";

}

curl_close($tw);

?>

Answer 1

If you’re searching with quotation marks for exact phrase matches then you need to escape these quotes before constructing your query string. With the current code:

$q = $_GET['q']
$search = "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=".$q."";

the input “test phrase” will result in this expression (which will probably cause a parse error):

"http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q="test phrase"";

Instead, try urlencoding the user input before including it in the search string:

$q = urlencode($_GET['q']);
$search = "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q={$q}";

Which should result in the value:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%22test%20phrase%22

You can check that this works by entering the URL in your browser.