Twitter feed authentication (API 1.1) for search

27 April, 2013 by Tom Elliott

This tutorial builds upon my previous two guides for Authenticating a twitter feed using OAuth and PHP (for any public Twitter user timeline) and creating a customised Twitter feed using HTML, jQuery and CSS.

Once you have the Twitter authentication working using OAuth and PHP, altering the PHP query to create a custom Twitter search is pretty straightforward. You can search for any key word, hashtag or Twitter handle you like, or use a combination of these searches terms.

Here’s a demo of a custom twitter search. It is based on mentions/tweets of @timberners_lee (founder of the Internet), the search term ‘netneutrality’ and the hashtag ‘openinternet’.

The Twitter Search PHP:

<?php
session_start();
require_once("twitteroauth/twitteroauth/twitteroauth.php"); //Path to twitteroauth library

$search = "@timberners_lee OR netneutrality OR #openinternet";
$notweets = 50;
$consumerkey = "12345678910";
$consumersecret = "12345678910";
$accesstoken = "12345678910";
$accesstokensecret = "12345678910";

function getConnectionWithAccessToken($cons_key, $cons_secret, $oauth_token, $oauth_token_secret) {
  $connection = new TwitterOAuth($cons_key, $cons_secret, $oauth_token, $oauth_token_secret);
  return $connection;
}

$connection = getConnectionWithAccessToken($consumerkey, $consumersecret, $accesstoken, $accesstokensecret);

$search = str_replace("#", "%23", $search);
$tweets = $connection->get("https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json?q=".$search."&count=".$notweets);

echo json_encode($tweets);
?>

As you can see, the PHP is similar as before but with a new search term and updated API path for the Twitter search (https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json). Obviously you’ll need to replace the 4x access and consumer key/tokens with your own as before. Check that the tweets are displaying before updating the JavaScript.

The Twitter Search Javascript:

Copy and paste JavaScript code here

Again the JavaScript is similar to the one we used for the user timeline with a few differences. As the search results return an array of user statuses, we need to drill down an extra level. The line ‘feeds = feeds.statuses;’ does just that.

I have added an optional autorefresh variable – if set to true, the twitter search feed will automatically refresh after the interval time defined by the refreshinterval variable (in milliseconds).

You can use exactly the same HTML structure and CSS from my custom twitter feed tutorial

Notes:
– Twitter only displays searches from the past week or so. Tweets might not appear if you’re searching for an obscure hashtag, phrase or user that doesn’t tweet much.
– Twitter doesn’t make all tweets available for search. View the ‘Why am I missing from search‘ article for more info

Updates:
– 04/08/2013 Added re-tweet indicator and tweet intent actions
– 19/09/2013 Added better hashtag support allowing hashtags to be used in the Twitter search query as well as key words

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