Some days ago I decided to experiment with Twitter API. They offer a really simple to use API and good documentation that allowed me to create a function to submit to twitter using PHP and the curl library.

So, Twitter offer in its documentation something like this…. ” Post a status update and get the resulting status back as JSON: curl -u username:password -d status=”your message here” http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json “

With this in mind we will be building our twitter_it() function.

Please remember to make the necessary validations and checks. This is just a simple example to demonstrate the the usage of the Twitter API.

<?php
/**
* This function will send a new status to your Twitter account
* Usage: twitter_it(“message goes here”);
*
* @param string $new_status
*/
function twitter_it($new_status = NULL) {

//TWITTER API URL
$twitter_url = “http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json”;
//Initiate curl
$curlh = curl_init();

//Post fields in a array
$data = array (“status” => $new_status);
//Set curl options.
curl_setopt($curlh, CURLOPT_URL, $twitter_url);
curl_setopt($curlh, CURLOPT_USERPWD, “<user>:<pass>”);
curl_setopt($curlh, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($curlh, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
//Excute curl with options
curl_exec($curlh);
//Close connection.
curl_close($curlh);

}

?>

If there is other way to do it. I’ll be glad to know and maybe enhance this one.

No tags