Show the world your Twitter type (using PHP and Google Charts)

I just had a bit of fun with Twitter and the Google charts API. You can now add an image to your blog, web site or wherever and show a picture of what kind of a twitter user you are. All you need to do is embed an image and give it the right source:

For example my user name is codepo8, which would be:

And the resulting image is:

For John Hicks for example it is:

And the resulting image is:

How it is done and how to “change stuff”

You can download the source code and have a play with this (I hope this will not spike my traffic :) so it might go offline if that is the case). There’s really not much magic to this:

First I get the user name and filter out nasties:

$user = $_GET[‘user’];

$isjs = “/^[a-z|A-Z|_|-|$|0-9|.]+$/”;

if(preg_match($isjs,$user)){

Then I set the content type to show the image and use cURL to get the information from the user’s twitter page.

header(‘Content-type:image/png’);

$info = array();

$cont = get(‘http://twitter.com/’.$user);

I get the information using regular expressions and put them in an associative array:

preg_match_all(‘/([^>]+)/msi’,$cont,$follow);

$info[‘follower’] = convert($follow[1][0]);

preg_match_all(‘/([^>]+)/msi’,$cont,$follower);

$info[‘followed’] = convert($follower[1][0]);

preg_match_all(‘/([^>]+)/msi’,$cont,$updates);

$info[‘updater’] = convert($updates[1][0]);

The convert function removes the comma punctuation added by twitter and makes sure the values are integers.

I then need to determine which of the three values is the highest and define a scaling factor as the Google API only allows values up to 100. I then check what the type of the user is by getting the right array key and change the values for displaying.

$max = max($info);

$convert = 100 / $max ;

foreach($info as $k=>$f){

if($f = $max){

$type = $k;

}

	
$disp[$k] = $f * $convert;

}
	

I check the type and assemble the display string accordingly:

if($type = ‘updater’){

$t = ’ is an ‘;

}

	
if($type = 'follower'){

$t = ' is a ';

}
	
if($type = ‘followed’){

$t = ’ is being ‘;

}
	
$title = $user . $t . $type;

I assemble the labels array and the values array and add all up to the correct Google charts API url. I use cURL to get the image and echo it out.

$out = array();

foreach($info as $k=>$i){

$out[] = $k.’+(‘.$i.’)’;

}

	
$labels = join($out,’|’);

$values = join($disp,’,’);

$img = get(‘http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chco=336699&’.

‘chtt=’.urlencode($title).’&chd=t:’.$values.

‘&chs=350×100&chl=’.$labels);

echo $img;

}
	

The rest are the cURL and convert helper functions.

function get($url){

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

$feed = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

return $feed;

}

	
function convert($x){

$x = str_replace(‘,’,’‘,$x);

$x = (int)$x;

return $x;

}
	

You like?

Faster version (one cURL, instead of two)

Instead of setting the PNG header and echoing out the image you can also just set a location header at the end and redirect the URL request to Google’s servers. I guess they have more bandwidth. :)

Tags: badge, curl, fame, Google, hack, php, twitter