Updating Twitter Status: Character Escaping and URLs

Question

Hello all,

I pass text from a POST variable from a form on my site to Twitter and I save this message on my own site. When I view the entry on my site it is absoultly fine. However, in some cases when there is an apostrophe in the message twitter updates the status of a user but escapes the apostrophes and this can be seen on the users status!

This doesn't happen when I update my twitter status on the twitter site. So I am wondering is there a way I need to pass text to twitter?

I currently do this and I make use of this awesome Twitter class. http://github.com/jmathai/twitter-async/tree

$success = $twitterObj->post_statusesUpdate(array('status' => $_POST['message'].$URL.$key));

In addition, passing URLs to twitter use to automatically link the URL but now this just appears as text?

Has twitter made changes in the past month that would cause the above to happen? If not how can I overcome this?

Thanks all

EDIT

More Code:

function tweetit(){
    global $URL;
    global $key;

    include './twitter/EpiCurl.php';
    include './twitter/EpiOAuth.php';
    include './twitter/EpiTwitter.php';

    $consumer_key = 'hidden';
    $consumer_secret = 'hidden';

    $twitterObj = new EpiTwitter($consumer_key, $consumer_secret);

    $twitterObj->setToken($_SESSION['oauth_token'], $_SESSION['oauth_token_secret']);

    $success = $twitterObj->post_statusesUpdate(array('status' =>  $_POST['message'].' '.$URL.$key));

    return $success->response['id']; 
}

Answer 1

You can use htmlentities function for this.

$success = $twitterObj->post_statusesUpdate(array('status' => htmlentities($_POST['message']).$URL.$key));

Or htmlspecialchars:

$success = $twitterObj->post_statusesUpdate(array('status' => htmlspecialchars($_POST['message']).$URL.$key));

Answer 2

Are you using the latest version? Not sure what the problem is since one of the unit tests for the library puts in single quotes (among other random characters).

http://github.com/jmathai/twitter-async/blob/master/tests/EpiTwitterTest.php#L90

Answer 3

Sounds like your php config has magic_quotes_gpc turned on, which automagically calls addslashes on all input (e.g., your POST values). I'd read up on addslashes/stripslashes in the php manual.

Answer 4

After you receive the post but before you send it off via the curl, remove slashes with stripslashes

urlencode(stripslashes($posted_status_update));

Answer 5

I had the same problem. Twitter behaves differently if called with www.twitter.com instead of twitter.com. This is a known bug.

http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=890&can=1&q=www&colspec=ID%20Stars%20Type%20Status%20Priority%20Owner%20Summary%20Opened%20Modified%20Component