How to get the total number of tweets, retweets and replies on a particular tag or account, in Twitter using its API? - twitter

Question

I have a requirement to get the total no.of tweets, retweets and replies on a particular tag or user account. How to get these numbers efficiently? The numbers should be exact and not like 100+.
I also need to get the total no.of direct messages.

Answer 1

Using this site as a starting point I've been trying the same thing:
Pull Twitter feed into your site
<?php
require_once 'db-functions.inc.php' ; //custom database functions
function saveTweets($screen_name) {
global $link;
$screen_name = dbEscape(strtolower(trim($screen_name)));
if (!$screen_name) { echo "<p><strong>Error: No screen name declared.</strong></p>\n"; return false; }
$row = dbGetRow("SELECT `id` FROM `retweet` WHERE `screen_name`='$screen_name' ORDER BY `id` DESC LIMIT 1");
$last_id = $row['id'];
$url = "http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=$screen_name&count=1500&include_rts=true" ;
if ($last_id) { $url .= "&since_id=$last_id" ; }
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
$xml = curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
$affected = 0;
$twelement = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
foreach ($twelement->status as $status) {
$text = dbEscape(trim($status->text));
$time = strtotime($status->created_at);
$id = $status->id;
$retweet_count = $status->retweet_count;
dbQuery("INSERT INTO `twit` (`id`,`screen_name`,`time`,`text`,`hidden`,`retweet_count`) VALUES ('$id','$screen_name','$time','$text','n','$retweet_count')");
$affected = $affected + dbAffectedRows();
}
return "<p>".number_format($affected)." new tweets from $screen_name saved.</p>\n" ;
}
echo saveTweets('stackoverflow');
echo saveTweets('Apple');
echo saveTweets('Android');
echo saveTweets('Google');
?>
<h3>Stackoverflow</h3>
<?php
require_once 'databaseconnection.php' ; //database connection function
$result = dbQuery("SELECT * FROM `retweet` WHERE `hidden` != 'y' ORDER BY `retweet_count` DESC");
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
echo $row[0];
echo "<br>";
echo date("l, M j, Y, G:i a",$row[3]);
echo " : ";
echo stripslashes($row[2]);
echo "<br>";
echo stripslashes($row[4]);
echo "<br>Retweet: ";
echo stripslashes($row[6]);
echo "<br>";
echo "<br>";
}
?>
At the present time this doesn't have an "UPDATE" clause in it to take into account the retweet_count increasing, and you can remove:
return "<p>".number_format($affected)." new tweets from $screen_name saved.</p>\n" ;
If you don't need to see what has been updated.
Hope that helps