How to Get the Number of Retweets in PHP
You can use the PHP hypertext preprocessor language to quickly retrieve the number of retweets for a particular tweet or link on the Twitter social networking site. You will need access to the TweetMeme API, because it offers a method to retrieve tweet count numbers with little difficulty. TweetMeme is a service that tracks Twitter users and messages. The part of the API you will use in this method is public. For a deeper analysis of Twitter usage, you can sign up for TweetMeme's paid Analytics API service. However, for this PHP code, no TweetMeme account is necessary.
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Instructions
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Open a new PHP document and insert the following code near the top, before the HTML "<body>" tag:
<?php
function tweetCount($URL) {
$content = file_get_contents("http://api.tweetmeme.com/url_info?URL=".$URL);
$element = new SimpleXmlElement($content);
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2
Type or insert the next lines of code below the first:
$retweets = $element->story->url_count;
if($retweets){
return $retweets;
} else {
return 0;
}
}
?>
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3
Go to the body section of the document and type the following PHP code anywhere between "<body>" and "</body>" tags:
<?php
echo "Retweeted "; tweetCount("http://example.com/link.html");
echo "times on Twitter."
?>
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4
Replace the "example.com/link.html" with the actual URL for which you want to retrieve a retweet count.
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5
Save the PHP document and upload it to your Web hosting account.
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6
Visit the Web page to view your content with the Twitter retweet count. It should read, "Retweeted (number) times on Twitter" with (number) replaced by the actual amount a link has been retweeted on Twitter.
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References
- Photo Credit Oli Scarff/Getty Images News/Getty Images
