PHP Function to Post to Twitter

In order to post twits to Twitter using Twitter APIs, you would first need to go to Twitter Dev site http://dev.twitter.com/apps.

You can easily follow the screen instructions to create a new application and get the tokens and secret key, which are required to access the APIs. It is therefore recommended to store these values inside a PHP constant file.

  $twitter_apikey = 'api key';
  $twitter_apisecret = 'api secret';
  $twitter_ownerid = 'owner id';
  $twitter_accesstoken = 'access token';
  $twitter_accesstokensecret = 'access token secret';
  $twitter_screenname = 'doctorzlai';

Now, the next thing is to use some PHP Library for Twitter. The best known is the OAuth, which can be found [here].

Posting a twit is thus easy using such library.

// helloacm.com
require('twitter/TwitterOAuth-1/TwitterOAuth/TwitterOAuth.php');
require('twitter/TwitterOAuth-1/TwitterOAuth/Exception/TwitterException.php');

require('twitter/TwitterOAuth-1/config.php');  
use TwitterOAuth\TwitterOAuth;
date_default_timezone_set('UTC');

$config = array(
    'consumer_key'       => $twitter_apikey, // API key
    'consumer_secret'    => $twitter_apisecret, // API secret
    'oauth_token'        => $twitter_accesstoken, // not needed for app only
    'oauth_token_secret' => $twitter_accesstokensecret,
    'output_format'      => 'object'
);
$tw = new TwitterOAuth($config);

function postTwitter($msg, $url = '') {
  $msg = trim($msg);
  $len = strlen($msg);
  if ($len <= 1) return false;   $url = trim($url);   if ($len >= 139) {
    $msg = substr($msg, 0, 139);
  }
  $params = array(
    'status' => $msg." ".$url
  );
  global $tw;
  return $tw->post('statuses/update', $params);
}

It is worth to mention that the Twitter APIs have the rate limit, which means you cannot use too many calls within a short time per IP address. Although, there is a 140 character limit per twits but the URL length is kinda excluded.

–EOF (The Ultimate Computing & Technology Blog) —