Display tweets from multiple users with a common hashtag

Question

I am building a program that displays a twitter feed of a specific set of users using a common hashtag. The program gets an array of usernames and a hashtag from user input in a form. I am using a regular expression (something I'm not very good with) to weed out the tweets containing the hashtag, which I then want to echo out. However, the program is currently not functioning. Here's my work:

    <?php
        $hash = $_GET['hash'];
        $users = $_GET['users'];
        $users = str_replace(" ", "", $users);
        $hash = str_replace(" ", "", $hash);
        $users = explode(",",$users);
        $regex = "/^[#]+[a-zA-Z0-9_]+[ ]$/";
        $url = 'http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q='.$user.'&lang=en&rpp=100';

        foreach($users as $user){
        $jsontwitter = file_get_contents($url);
        $twitter = json_decode($jsontwitter, true);
        $twittertext = $twitter["results"];

        if(preg_match($regex, $twittertext['text'])){
        foreach($twittertext as $text){
        echo '<a href="http://twitter.com/'.$text['from_user'].'">@'.$text['from_user'].'</a>: '.$text['text'].'<br>';
            }
          }
        }
    ?>

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You should first correct typos. Your q= variable is empty because the variable on line 8 is not defined above. It appears you may have wanted to use '$users' there, as defined on line 3. I would test from the command line (as shown below) with static variable set on line 2 and 3. Place print statements throughout to determine your fail point.

$ php test.html
Warning: file_get_contents(http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=&lang=en&rpp=100): failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden

Answer 2

figured it out, with the help of a friend. the $url variable needed to be within the for loop in order to run the search with the defined $user variable. From there, the json is returned, decoded and the results are run through another for loop to isolate individual tweets that include the specified hashtag, using a regular expression in an if statement. the tweets are then echoed out. additionally, the way the regular expression was treated was incorrect - it was looking for a string that begins with a # and included any characters, ending with a space. It should be looking for a string with a # anywhere in it, that is followed by the $hash variable, followed by a space.

The resulting, working script:

<?php
$hash = $_GET['hash'];
$users = $_GET['users'];

$users = str_replace(" ", "", $users);
$hash = str_replace(" ", "", $hash);
$users = explode(",",$users);

$regex = "/($i)#". $hash ."/";


foreach($users as $user){

    $url = 'http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q='.$user.'&lang=en&rpp=100';
    $jsontwitter = file_get_contents($url);
    $twitter = json_decode($jsontwitter, true);
    $twittertext = $twitter["results"];

    foreach($twittertext as $text){
        if(preg_match($regex, $text['text'])){
            echo '<a href="http://twitter.com/'.$text['from_user'].'">@'.$text['from_user'].'</a>: '.$text['text'].'<br>';

        }
    }
}       

?>