Question

I’ve recently wrote a little script that get’s my Twitter feed and caches it to save on HTTP requests. Without WordPress it works great, as soon as I add it to WordPress everything goes wrong, which makes sense because file_get_contents doesn’t particularly work correctly in WordPress. I tried using: wp_remote_get() instead but I just get the following error:

Fatal error: Cannot use object of type WP_Error as array in

which is this line:

$tweets = json_decode($contents['body']);

Code without adding to WordPress: (Which works fine)

$file = "tweets.txt";
if (@file_exists($file) and @filemtime($file)>=strtotime("-10 minutes")) {
    $tweets = json_decode(file_get_contents($file));
} else {
    $tweets = file_get_contents("http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=jack&include_rts=true");
    $fh = fopen($file, 'w');
    fwrite($fh, $tweets);
    fclose($fh);
    $tweets = json_decode($tweets);
}
$i = 0;
foreach($tweets as $tweet) {
    $tweetText = preg_replace('#\b(([\w-]+://?|www[.])[^\s()<>]+(?:\([\w\d]+\)|([^[:punct:]\s]|/)))#','<a href="$1">$1</a>', $tweet->text);
    $tweetText = preg_replace('/(^|\s)@([a-z0-9_]+)/i','$1<a href="http://www.twitter.com/$2">@$2</a>', $tweetText);
    $tweetText .= " - " . date('G:i F jS',strtotime($tweet->created_at));
    echo '<p>'.$tweetText.'</p>';
    ++$i;
    if ($i==3) {break;}
}   

Code when adding to WordPress:

$file = "tweets.txt";
if (@file_exists($file) and @filemtime($file)>=strtotime("-10 minutes")) {
    $contents = wp_remote_get($file);
    $tweets = json_decode($contents['body']);
} else {
    $tweets = wp_remote_get("http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=jack&include_rts=true");
    $fh = fopen($file, 'w');
    fwrite($fh, $tweets);
    fclose($fh);
    $tweets = json_decode($contents['body']);
}
$i = 0;
foreach($tweets as $tweet) {
    $tweetText = preg_replace('#\b(([\w-]+://?|www[.])[^\s()<>]+(?:\([\w\d]+\)|([^[:punct:]\s]|/)))#','<a href="$1">$1</a>', $tweet->text);
    $tweetText = preg_replace('/(^|\s)@([a-z0-9_]+)/i','$1<a href="http://www.twitter.com/$2">@$2</a>', $tweetText);
    $tweetText .= " - " . date('G:i F jS',strtotime($tweet->created_at));
    echo '<p>'.$tweetText.'</p>';
    ++$i;
    if ($i==3) {break;}
}   

I’m quite new to using HTTP requests like JSON. I’m sorry if I left anything out and/or this becomes a really easy solution. Thanks.

Answer 1

From the codex it says that wp_remote_get() returns results as an array

http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_API/wp_remote_get

As you can see in this answer – json_decode to array, you need to specify in json_decode() that it’s an array rather than an object.

So I’m thinking it should be;

$tweets = json_decode($contents['body'], true);