Question

I’m trying to use file_get_contents() to grab a twitter feed, however I’m getting the following warning:

failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request

My code:

$feed = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=google&count=6';
$tweets = file_get_contents($feed);

I’m using Google just for the sake of testing. allow_url_fopen is enabled in my php.ini file.

Any idea what could be wrong?

Answer 1

You should use the PHP cURL extension if it’s available, as it’s many times faster, more powerful, and easier to debug. Here is an example that does the same thing you were trying:

function curl($url) {
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
    $data = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);

    return $data;
}

$feed = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=google&count=6';
$tweets = curl($feed);