Twitter API: Url search for Username

Question

I have a list of websites where I want to see if they have twitter accounts. I was curious if there is a url search for username in the API, or something of this nature. I\'

Answer 1

Here's my code that checks if the user does exist, based on Jimbo's very useful PHP class as detailed above.

First, use json_decode to convert $result into a PHP array. Make sure to set the second parameter to true so that you won't get Objects in the resulting array:

$result = json_decode($result, true);

Now you have to check if the screen_name array key exists, but array_key_exists doesn't recursively look through multidimensional arrays. So you'll need a new function as found here:

function array_key_exists_r($needle, $haystack) {
    $result = array_key_exists($needle, $haystack);

    if ($result) return $result;

    foreach ($haystack as $v) {
        if (is_array($v)) {
             $result = array_key_exists_r($needle, $v);
        }
        if ($result) return $result;
    }

    return $result;
}

And below is the final piece of code that makes it all work. Note where I'm pointing to in the $result array. I'm basically looking at the screen_name of the user who posted the first tweet, since the Twitter API returns the timeline of the user as specified in $username.

$result = json_decode($result, true);

if ( array_key_exists_r('screen_name', $result ) ) {
    if ( $result[0]['user']['screen_name'] == $username ) {
        // The username exists
    }
} else {
    // The username doesn't exist
}

I'm not sure if there's a better way to check if the username exists. Maybe just use check for an error code instead?