php - Twitter search by hashtag example API v1.1

Question

In the past, using Twitter API version 1, I used the following URL to get a JSON feed of all tweets with the hashtag "baseball":

http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=%23baseball&result_type=recent

How do you achieve a similar result using API version 1.1? I'm using PHP as my server-side code, so not sure if I need to use it to authenticate and such?

Sample code would be extremely helpful. Thanks.

Answer 1

As you know, authenticated requests are now required, so there's a few things that you may need to take a look at first. The new 1.1 search, how to use hashtags, and authentication.

Twitter Search for 1.1

The new twitter search api docs can be found here. According to these docs:

https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json is the new resource URL to use for search.

Hashtag searches

You've got that part right! %23 decodes to a # character.

Authentication

OAuth is a lot more complex. It would help if you just used a library that just worked.

Here's a post a lot of people found useful to help you make authenticated requests to the 1.1 API. This includes a one-file include library to make requests like those you require.

Example

This example assumes you're using the above library and set up your keys etc. To make your request:

// Your specific requirements
$url = 'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json';
$requestMethod = 'GET';
$getfield = '?q=#baseball&result_type=recent';

// Perform the request
$twitter = new TwitterAPIExchange($settings);
echo $twitter->setGetfield($getfield)
             ->buildOauth($url, $requestMethod)
             ->performRequest();

Yes, that's it. Apart from the little setting up you need to do (as my post explains), for your dev keys, that's everything you need to perform authenticated requests.

Response

The response is returned to you in JSON. From the overview:

API v1.1 will support JSON only. We've been hinting at this for some time now, first dropping XML support on the Streaming API and more recently on the trends API. We've chosen to throw our support behind the JSON format shared across the platform.