Twitter follower count number

Question

Is the only way to get the follower count number in plain text is using cURL? or does the twitter API provides any such option?

Answer 1

Twitter API 1.0 is deprecated and is no longer active. With the REST 1.1 API, you need oAuth authentication to retrieve data from Twitter.

Use this instead:

 "YOUR_OAUTH_ACCESS_TOKEN",
        'oauth_access_token_secret' => "YOUR_OAUTH_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET",
        'consumer_key' => "YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY",
        'consumer_secret' => "YOUR_CONSUMER_SECRET"
    );

    $ta_url = 'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json';
    $getfield = '?screen_name=REPLACE_ME';
    $requestMethod = 'GET';
    $twitter = new TwitterAPIExchange($settings);
    $follow_count=$twitter->setGetfield($getfield)
    ->buildOauth($ta_url, $requestMethod)
    ->performRequest();
    $data = json_decode($follow_count, true);
    $followers_count=$data[0]['user']['followers_count'];
    echo $followers_count;
?>