When using the Twitter API's "Streaming API", you often have to pass in Twitter User IDs as arguments, rather than Twitter usernames (aka "screen name"). I wrote a small command-line PHP program that obtains Twitter User IDs from Twitter usernames. This is what it looks like when you run it:

$ php getuserid.php rickumali yomamali 21111241 => Ranniel Umali (yomamali) 16067265 => Rick Umali (rickumali) I liked writing this little program. There's one line (line 2 below) that reminded me of Perl, for its quirky keyword:

unset($argv[0]); # Removes the program from the argument array list $lookup .= implode(',',$argv); # Comma separate the arguments In Perl, you'd use join (with the same arguments) to achieve this (though in PHP the argument array contains the command in the 0th index. I unset this variable in line 1.)

Another thing that was interesting was PHP's "built-in" JSON support. In general, you should be using JSON to interact with the Twitter API, and you should hope for JSON to be in your PHP already. In my code, I have this:

$data = json_decode($json); if (is_array($data)) { foreach ($data as $user) { print $user->{'id'} . " => " . $user->{'name'} . " (" . $user->{'screen_name'} . ")\n"; $id_list[] = $user->{'id'}; } } I reference the elements (line 4) inside the $user object with the arrow operator because json_decode(), by default, returns objects (not arrays). If I had specified json_decode($json, TRUE), then the user object is a PHP array, and I could then use $user['id'] to obtain the id value.