Question

I’m building an event based on the current tweet count in php that holds a particular hashtag.
On the main page I have a counter that says: “tweets so far: xxx”. I used this php script:

global $total, $hashtag;
$hashtag = '#somehashtag';
$total = 0;
function getTweets($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);

   $json_decode = json_decode($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);

Next, I save the result in my database:

$updateCount = "UPDATE tweets SET currentcount = '$total'";   
$doQuery = mysql_query($updateCount, $con) or die(mysql_error());

This script runs by a cronjob that fires the script every 2 minutes.
It works fine. But this script returns only 1500 tweets since twitter doesn’t allow any more.

How can I still keep track of the current tweet count? I know there is no way of going above the max tweets of the twitter api. But maybe through time or database checks?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The way I would do it:

• save the last tweets id you got in the database with the current count.
• on the next run, get the tweets from that tweet on, add the number of tweets to the count and update the last tweet entry with the new last tweet.
• Lather, rinse, repeat.

One problem with the approach: if there are more than 1500 tweets in less than 2 minutes, some will not be counted.

To get the tweets from your last tweet on, you can use the since_id parameter:

since_id: returns tweets with status ids greater than the given id.

Twitter Search API