Check if twitter username exists

Question

Is there a way to check if a twitter username exists? Without being authenticated with OAuth or the twitter basic authentication?

Answer 1

Using Ruby, you could install the twitter gem and then define the following method:

require 'twitter'

def user_exists?(user)
  Twitter.user(user)
  true
rescue Twitter::NotFound
  false
end

Then, simply pass in a Twitter user name or id to your method, like so:

user_exists?("sferik") #=> true
user_exists?(7505382) #=> true