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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T18:48:10+00:00

I’m using PHP to display the most recent tweet from a user. This is

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I’m using PHP to display the most recent tweet from a user. This is in WordPress. This works most of the time – but sometimes, I get this error:

file_get_contents(http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/%5Busername%5D.json) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request in […]/twitter.php on line 47

I’m absolutely certain that I’m not going over the Twitter API limit, because even if my caching code is flawed, no one else can see this – it’s hosted locally – and there’s no way I viewed the page 150 times in an hour. I’ve tested that the username and database entries are indeed being retrieved. This is my code:

<?php
function twitter($username) {
$tweet = '';
echo $username;
if (!get_option('twitter_last_updated')) {
    $format='json';
    $tweet_raw=file_get_contents("http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/{$username}.{$format}");
    $tweet = json_decode($tweet_raw);
    add_option('twitter_last_updated', time(), "", "yes");
    add_option('twitter_last_updated_author', $username, "", "yes");
    add_option('twitter_last_updated_data', $tweet_raw, "", "yes");
} elseif (time() - get_option('twitter_last_updated') > 30 || get_option('twitter_last_updated_author') != $username) {
    $format='json';
 $tweet_raw=file_get_contents("http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/{$username}.{$format}");
    $tweet = json_decode($tweet_raw);
    update_option('twitter_last_updated', time());
    update_option('twitter_last_updated_author', $username);
    update_option('twitter_last_updated_data', $tweet_raw);
} else {
$tweet = json_decode(get_option('twitter_last_updated_data'));
} ?>
<!-- display the tweet -->
<?php } ?>

I would really appreciate some help with this. I feel totally stumped.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    First, you should not be using file_get_contents to retrieve “files” over the network. You should use curl. It could be just system response delays, or twitter issuing a redirect for load balancing. file_get_contents doesn’t follow redirects and basically times out immediately. Curl can be set to follow redirects and adheres to the network timeout (1 minute I think) if no time out is specified. Most importantly, curl can tell why it failed.

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