Question

thanks !

In php, I would like to know if a twitter user exist.
For that, I try to recover the content of the url :

$json = file_get_contents("http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=".$_GET['search']);
$jsonObject = json_decode($json);

Where $_GET[‘search’] = is the name of the user passed in the URL.

But the problem is that if someone give a username which don’t exist I got an error.

On php.net, they say that file_get_contents return false if there is an error.

I tried to do in a condition :

if(file_get_contents("http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=".$_GET['search']) != false){
    // do my stuff 
}
else{
    // say that this username don't exists
}

But when I try this code, I got a big orange warning code which says :

Warning: file_get_contents(http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=A_Wrong_User_Name) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP

So I could I remove the error and just check if the twitter user exists or not.
I he exists, I want to get the content of the page with file_get_contents, if not, I want to display that the user doesn’t exist.

Thanks for help !

Answer 1

You should use CURL instead of file_get_contents :

<?php
 $username = "user";

 $url="http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show/".$username.".xml";

 $ch = curl_init();
 curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
 curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 20);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, 1);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

 curl_exec($ch);
 $header = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
 curl_close($ch);

 if( $header == "404" )
 {
 //it does not exist
 }else{
 //it exists
 }