Question

Worked with XML feeds before, but this one seems to be causing an error.

I am not experienced so please be gentle.

The following code should load in a Twitter feed using its XML address. And it does 20% of the time. The other times it returns in error. I have no idea why.

<?php 
   if(simplexml_load_file('https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/quitecheesedoff.xml?count=6')) {
      $xml = simplexml_load_file('https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/quitecheesedoff.xml?count=6');
      $tweets = $xml->xpath("/statuses/status");

      foreach($tweets as $tweet) {
         $text = $tweet->text;
         $date = $tweet->created_at;
         echo '<div class="tweet"><b>' . $text . '</b>' . $date . '</div>';
      }
   }
   else echo 'error';
?>

Error

Warning:
simplexml_load_file(https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/quitecheesedoff.xml?count=6)
[function.simplexml-load-file]: failed to open stream: HTTP request
failed! HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request in

Answer 1

You’re probably making too many requests, triggering the hourly request limit of 150 – which becomes 75 with your code.

I’d recommend using

if (($xml = simplexml_load_file('...')) !== FALSE) {

instead. Your $xml = ... line is then not required anymore.

Update:

The 400 error isn’t always actually used for bad requests at Twitter. Since it works 20% of the time I’d say it’s safe to say there’s something else.

• Avoid XML unless your programming language doesn’t accept JSON (PHP does so use JSON!)
• Avoid using non-recommended URLs. Use https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.xml?count=6&screen_name=quitecheesedoff instead.

In the past the 400 error was also given when Twitter’s internal proxies made mistakes.