Return the profile image (avatar) of a Twitter user using their RSS feed (no API call necessary).

get_twitter_avatar.php

<?php
function getTwitterAvatar( $username, $size = "normal" ) {
	// mini = 24px, normal = 48px, bigger = 73px
	$sizes = array( "mini", "normal", "bigger" );
	
	// Check for size, default to normal
	if( in_array( $size, $sizes ) ) {
		$variant = $size;
	} else {
		$variant = "normal";
	}
	
	// Get the user's profile image from their RSS feed
	$rawxml = simplexml_load_file( "http://twitter.com/users/{$username}.xml" );
	$imageurl = $rawxml->profile_image_url;
	
	// Return the image's url with the size requested
	if( $variant == "normal" ) {
		return $imageurl;
	} else {
		return str_replace( "normal", $variant, $imageurl );
	}
}
?>

@notasausage, an excellent hack! Two things:

1. I think if you add the opening <?php tag, you'll get syntax highlighting, which is nice.
2. Line 13, you could just write as: $rawxml = simplexml_load_file( "http://twitter.com/users/{$username}.xml" );
   • Technically, interpolation is faster than concatenation. As a matter of opinion, to me, this way is easier to read w/ syntax highlighting.

Thanks for the input, @jeffbyrnes. I've updated this accordingly.

@notasausage you're welcome. Only thing I'd also encourage here would be some kind of local caching. You might check out phpFlickr for an example of some caching that might be able to be borrowed for you needs.

That's my plan, @jeffbyrnes. Didn't feel like putting that in a Gist though, trying to keep it simple enough for anyone to implement however they'd like.

I should also note that the php.ini on your server must have allow_url_fopen = on in order for this to work, otherwise PHP will throw an error on the simplexml_load_file() function.