In my previous jQuery tutorial I discussed how you can authenticate against the Twitter API to retrieve personal data. However, what we didn’t do is show you how to POST data back to Twitter, like tweeting. It’s actually very simple, and can be done by quickly updating your cURL script in PHP.

cURL POSTFIELDS

<?php

$username = "yourusername";
$password = "yourpassword";
$twitterHost = "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml";
$yourStatus = "Hello - I am Tweeting from my custom script!";
$curl;

$curl = curl_init();

curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$username:$password");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION, CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "status=". urlencode(stripslashes(urldecode($yourStatus))));
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $twitterHost);

$result = curl_exec($curl);
$resultArray = curl_getinfo($curl);

if ($resultArray['http_code'] == 200) {

echo "Success!"

} else {

echo "We have failed... oh no!";

}
curl_close($curl);

?>

This script is very very similar to the last one we discussed. All we have changed is the Twitter API url, and added an additional cURL statement to add POSTFIELDS to the cURL call. Very lovely!

Conclusion

That just about wraps up my 3 part tutorial on how to work with the Twitter API with PHP and jQuery. I hope you enjoyed the set, and please feel free to add your own feedback and comments below.

Further Reading on this topic…

Developing the Twitter API	Practical Web2.0 with PHP	PHP Web Development