Question

I’m working on a class that will count twitter reactions to a link and also display them.

Currently I’m working on the counting portion and my count always equals 0 even though the array created in the constructor has multiple elements.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

<?php
    class TwitterReactions{

        function __construct($url){
            if($url){
                $output=array();
                $query = 'http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q='.$url;
                $reactions=file_get_contents($query);

                $reactions_array=json_decode($reactions, TRUE);

                foreach($reactions_array as $results){
                    foreach($results as $result){
                        $output['user'][]=$result['from_user'];
                        $output['image'][]=$result['profile_image_url'];
                        $output['message'][]=$result['text'];
                        $output['date'][]=$result['created_at'];
                    }
                }
                return $output['user'];

            } else {
                echo "<p>Please provide a url...</p>";
            }
        }

        function count_reactions($output){
            //print_r($output);
                $count = count($output['user']);
                return $count;
        }
    }
?>

Answer 1

I agree with some of what Aliaksandr Astashenkau has in his answer but there are still some problems with the class.

It looks to me as if your initial problem was that you were expecting the __construct to return $output and you were then passing the object that you created into the count_reactions() method. Something like this…

$twitter = new TwitterReactions($url);
$count = $twitter->count_reactions($twitter);

You don’t have your call to the count_reactions() method posted so this is just a hunch. If that’s how you were using it the constructor it isn’t meant to be used that way. Constructors always return a new instance of the class. You cannot return any other type of value from a constructor. You cannot use the return keyword in the __construct method.

As Aliaksandr Astashenkau points out $output should be a class member. I would also make $count a class member. In this case there’s not much of a point of making either private so you don’t really need accessor methods either but you can include them if you want.

I would make the class something like this…

<?php

class TwitterReactions
{
    public $url = '';
    public $output = array();
    public $count = 0;

    function __construct($url)
    {
        $this->url = $url;

        $query = 'http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q='.$url;
        $reactions=file_get_contents($query);
        $reactions_array=json_decode($reactions, TRUE);

        foreach($reactions_array as $results)
        {
            foreach($results as $key => $result)
            {
                // I find it easier if the data is arranged by each tweet but you can keep the array structure how you have it.
                $this->output[$key]['user'] = $result['from_user'];
                $this->output[$key]['image'] = $result['profile_image_url'];
                $this->output[$key]['message'] = $result['text'];
                $this->output[$key]['date'] = $result['created_at'];
            }
        }

        $this->count = count($this->output);
    }
}

You could then use the class like this

$twitter = new TwitterReactions($url);
// you now have access to output directly
$twitter->output;
// and count
$twitter->count;

Anyhow there are many ways to accomplish the same thing but I hop this helps give you some ideas.