PHP Twitter Results without Retweets and Duplicates

twitter-search-results.php

<?php

/**
 * Twitter Search Results PHP script that removes retweets and similar tweets.
 *
 * @author     http://techslides.com
 * @link       http://techslides.com/grab-twitter-results-with-php-and-remove-retweets-and-duplicates
 */


//curl request returns json output via json_decode php function
function curl($url){
	$ch = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
	$result = curl_exec($ch);

	$json_output = json_decode($result,true);

	curl_close($ch);
	return $json_output;
}

//autolink function uses regex to transform link text to actual links
function autolink($str, $attributes=array()) {
	$attrs = '';
	foreach ($attributes as $attribute => $value) {
		$attrs .= " {$attribute}=\"{$value}\"";
	}

	$str = ' ' . $str;
	$str = preg_replace(
		'`([^"=\'>])((http|https|ftp)://[^\s<]+[^\s<\.)])`i',
		'$1<a href="$2"'.$attrs.'>$2</a>',
		$str
	);
	$str = substr($str, 1);
	
	return $str;
}

//parse the json output, remove wierd characters, and return an array of actual tweets
function getResults($json){
	$results = array();
	foreach($json["results"] as $e){
	    //clean up wierd characters
	    $clean = preg_replace('/[^(\x20-\x7F)\x0A]*/','', $e['text']);
	    $text = autolink($clean);
	    $results[] = $text;
	}
	return $results;
}

//use the php similar_text function to remove similar tweets
function removeSimilar($results){
	$return = array();

	foreach($results as $a){
		$check = 0;

		foreach($results as $b){
			if($a != $b){
				similar_text($a, $b, $sim);
				if($sim > 70){
					//similarity to other elements based on 70
					$check = 1;	
				}
			}
		}

		if($check == 0){
			$return[] = $a;
		}

	}
	return $return;
}






$search = $_GET["term"];

if (empty($search)) {
    //term param not passed in url
    exit;
} else {
    //change space to plus and remove retweets
    $term = str_replace(" ", "+", $search)."+-filter:retweets";
}

//grab 100 recent results and include entities
$url = 'http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q='.$term.'&rpp=100&include_entities=true&result_type=recent';

//make a curl request and return json
$json = curl($url);

//pass the json to a function that returns an array of tweets
$results = getResults($json);

//pass the tweets to a function that removes similar tweets
$clean = removeSimilar($results);

//print the results using an unordered list
echo "<ul>";
foreach($clean as $a){
     echo "<li>".$a."</li>";
}
echo "</ul>";

?>

Twitter Script Demo