How to count the number of twitter followers via php?

Question

Good morning. I’m developing a blog and I need to list the number of followers that a certain company has, but I’m not able to do it. I managed to do the Facebook likes listing but Twitter can not at all

$xml = file_get_contents('http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?screen_name=cissamagazine'); if (preg_match('/followers_count>(.*)</', $xml, $array) != 0) {
$seguidores['count'] = $array[1];}echo $seguidores['count'];

Answer 1

Through the Twitter API

It’s been a while since Twitter closed access to information and even limited requests to the developer community. You can check that in REST Apis of the version 1.1 (which is the current) authentication is required to perform any type of request, including for this one you tried to do, the GET users/show.

I have a post detailed on my website about it. But basically the steps to reach your goal through the method Application-only Authentication are these:

• Create an application to obtain API key and API secret;
• Through the keys, get the bearer token;
• With the token, carry out the desired request;

Getting the bearer token:

$encoded_consumer_key = urlencode(CONSUMER_KEY); // API key
$encoded_consumer_secret = urlencode(CONSUMER_SECRET); // API secret
$bearer_token = $encoded_consumer_key . ':' . $encoded_consumer_secret;
$base64_consumer_key = base64_encode($bearer_token);
$url = "https://api.twitter.com/oauth2/token";
$headers = array(
        "POST /oauth2/token HTTP/1.1",
        "Host: api.twitter.com",
        "User-Agent: Twitter Application-only OAuth App",
        "Authorization: Basic " . $base64_consumer_key,
        "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=UTF-8",
        "Content-Length: 29"
);
 
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "grant_type=client_credentials");
$header = curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
$httpcode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
$response = curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$output = explode("\n", $response);
$bearer_token = '';
foreach($output as $line) {
    if ($line !== false) {
        $bearer_token = $line;
    }
}
$bearer_token = json_decode($bearer_token);
$bearer_token = $bearer_token->{'access_token'};

When then you have the token at hand, you can make your request to get user information:

$url = "https://api.twitter.com/1.1/users/show.json";
$formed_url = '?screen_name=cissamagazine';
$headers = array(
        "GET /1.1/users/show.json" . $formed_url . " HTTP/1.1",
        "Host: api.twitter.com",
        "User-Agent: Twitter Application-only OAuth App",
        "Authorization: Bearer " . $bearer_token,
);
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url . $formed_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

In the variable $response you will have a JSON, that you can manipulate it the way you want to get user information.