Linkify Your Twitter Feed

Discussion

1. Brian Cray

   Great article!
2. Oliver

   Hey David!

   This works just fantastic. Took like 2 mins for me to impliment it into my website and I am a total php beginner!

   Thank you so much!

   Cheers from Bonn, germany,
   Oliver
3. Jeremy Parrish

   Hi Oliver,

   I’m glad it worked for you. It’s nice when you can add something useful in just 2 minutes!
4. Luke

   Exactly what I’ve been looking for actually. Thanks :)
5. Drew Douglass

   Nice work Jeremy. Nice to see someone putting Regexs to good use!
6. crises

   Hi, i think @Luke’s website contains a trojan in his favicon.ico file. Check it.
7. Mighty Alex

   Wow, I needed this. Thanks a lot.
8. Marty Thornley

   Jeremy!

   Thank you so much. I have been searching and searching for any easy way to do this that was not already buried in a wordpress plugin or some other place where there were a bunch of extras I didn’t need. All I wanted was to call a simple function passing username and the number of statuses to echo.

   I combined all your stuff and wrote a function called get_Tweets() . It takes $username and $count as variables, loops through the count and echos $count number of statuses as LI elements. So simple, yet I couldn’t find the starting point anywhere!

   To include it with the wordpress theme I am building, I just stuck the finished function in my functions.php file then called get_Tweets(‘USERNAME’, ‘COUNT’) between a UL tag.

   I wanted to include a copy of the code in here, but it didn’t seem to want to let me include the php and it looked a little confusing.

   I would be happy to share with anyone who is interested.

   Thanks again, Jeremy!

   Going to subscribe to your RSS and check out the rest of your site.

   Marty
9. Jeremy Parrish

   @Marty: Thanks for the note. I’m glad you found it useful! If you want, you could probably throw your code up on David’s pastebin and throw a link back here in the comments. It sounds like it might be useful for others.
10. Josh

    I’ve created a wordpress plugin that will automatically create tag and user links in your posts/pages/comments when #tagname or @username are used… However, I’ve just noticed an issue. When the function runs hooked to “the_content()” if you have any inline styles (color=”#ab0000;”) then the colors are assumed to be tags since they have the pound symbol in front of them.

    Is there a way to make the regex differentiate between css color codes and tags you insert?
11. Jeremy Parrish

    @Josh: The function should really only be passed the actual tweet text, without any container markup. However, if you can assure that there is no whitespace character immediately preceding the ‘#’ character (e.g. “color:#ab0000;”), you should be OK. I still wouldn’t recommend using it that way, though.
12. Chad

    Any idea on why I’m getting a “Fatal error: Call to undefined function: json_decode()”? I’m running PHP 5.2.9 so I believe this function would be in there.
13. Alex Hall

    Thank you so much for creating this! I’ve got everything else sorted for a little Twitter App I’m working on, but I have no clue when it comes to Regex in PHP, so this is perfect!
14. Pedro

    Thanks!!
    Save my day…
15. sdesocio

    Im kind of a dummy with this stuff but I thought I was supposed to put everything inside of the function.php file, but that doesnt seem to work.
16. RJ

    What about URLs that contain hash characters? Won’t the part of the URL after the tag get linkified as a hashtag?
17. Shahid

    thank you very much. i have been searching for this for two days and could not find any solutions. but luckily i see this and done in 10 minutes.
18. Dharma

    Great article. Thanks. Helped me.
19. Orun Bhuiyan

    Thanks for the regexp!
20. robert

    Hi David,

    i use your code and this code to display feeds on my page $this->linkify($feed_item->text) and I have small problem if you can help? The result is Twitter results feedhttp://t.co/F6xyyR9Ee7 and I would like to be like this Twitter results feed. can you help me? Any idea how I could do? Thank you very much
21. robert

    i write code result again:

    this is the result:
    Twitter results feed http://t.co/F6xyyR9Ee7
    and i want to be like this
    Twitter results feed
    basically want “Twitter results feed” to be inside of tag
• Nick

  Robert:

  replace this:

  $status_text = preg_replace(
  ‘/(https?:\/\/\S+)/’,
  ‘\1‘,
  $status_text
  );
  

  with this:

  $status_text = preg_replace(
  ‘/(https?:\/\/\S+)/’,
  ‘Twitter results feed‘,
  $status_text
  );
  
• Nick

  Sorry, my code pasted wrong.

  I meant to say replace the \1 with whatever text you want the link to be in the second parameter of the preg_replace function

  https://gist.github.com/anonymous/9237526
22. Nicolas

    <?php
    function linkify($text) {
    	$search = array("/[\w]+\:\/\/([\w-?&;#~=\.\/\@]+[\w\/])/",
    					"/#([\p{L}]+)/",
    					"/@([\p{L}]+)/");
    	$replace = array("$1",
    					 "#$1",
    					 "@$1");
    	return preg_replace($search, $replace, $text);
    }
    ?>
23. Matthew

    Any ideas on how to use this, but grab the display name of the URL to use as the anchor output instead of just the URL itself.

    For example.. If Im trying to promote my blog site and I have a tweet that says: “MyBlog.com has undergone a facelift and is ready for everyone to read.” The replacement link would say “http://t.co/12345abc has undergone…”.

    This is ugly and ruins the read… How would one get the display name from the feed and use that to put in the anchor instead of the ugly URL?