How to parse JSON (from Twitter) with PHP??

[Zenax]

Hi,

I assume that since the re-design of the forums, this is the best place to put it.

I am building a small script with PHP, that fetches from the Twitter API. I have managed to get the JSON output, but now am at a loss as to how to process the information I receive. I was wondering if you could look at the code I have below and help me to display it properly in HTML and CSS format??

<?php

    session_start();

    require_once("twitteroauth-master/twitteroauth/twitteroauth.php");

    $account                         =        '';

    function get_Tweets($account) {
        $noTweets                    =        10;

        $api_key                    =        '';
        $api_secret                    =        '';

        $access_key                 =         '';
        $access_key_secret            =        '';

        function new_twitter_favourite_list($cons_key, $cons_secret, $oauth_token, $oauth_token_secret) {
            $connect_to_twitter        =        new TwitterOAuth($cons_key,$cons_secret,$oauth_token,$oauth_token_secret);
            return $connect_to_twitter;
        }

        $connect_to_twitter = new_twitter_favourite_list($api_key, $api_secret, $access_key, $access_key_secret);
        $tweets = $connect_to_twitter->get("https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=".$account."&count=".$noTweets);

        return $tweets;

        foreach($tweets as $tweet) {
            $status         =     $tweet->text;
            $tweetTime        =     $tweet->created_at;
            $tweetId         =     $tweet->id_str;

            $output             =      '<li>'.$status.'<a style="font-size:85%" href="http://twitter.com/'.$account.'/statuses/'.$tweetId.'">'. $tweetTime .'</a></li>';

            echo $output;
        }

    }

Any help greatly appreciated!! (Please ignore the terrible indentation in my code, it didn't seem to paste right from Sublime into this post.)

 

[essellar]

All you seem to be missing is a json_decode() call between getting the JSON and iterating over the tweets. json_decode() will convert the JSON text into a nested PHP array/hash/dictionary thingy for you.

 

[Zenax]

So instead of echoing the outut as $ouput I should do something like

json_decode($output);

?? and when it comes out as an array how would I get certain details out of said array??

 

[essellar]

No, $tweets needs to be JSON-decoded:

$tweets = json_decode($connect_to_twitter->get("https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=".$account."&count=".$noTweets));

You already have the code in place to iterate through the array (it's what that foreach($tweets as $tweet){...} loop is all about). Oh, you'll need to get rid of the return $tweets; line, since you're not taking that variable outside of the get_Tweets() function.