I can't post to Twitter using cURL and PHP

Question

I am unable to tweet continuously in twitter - every three tweets I get:

Error posting to Twitter. Retry

How do I fix this?

My code is as follows:

$host = "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xmlstatus=".urlencode(stripslashes(urldecode($message)));
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $host);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$username:$password");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION, CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Expect:'));
$result = curl_exec($ch);
// Look at the returned header
$resultArray = curl_getinfo($ch);
//print_r($resultArray);
if($resultArray['http_code'] == "200"){
     $twitter_status='Your message has been Tweeted';
     update_tweet_extra($result_id,"1");
} else {
 $twitter_status="Error posting to Twitter. Retry";
 // update_tweet_extra($result_id,"0");
}
echo  $twitter_status;

Answer 1

This seems very odd, since status updates via the Twitter API are not rate-limited (see here), unless you're updating more than 1000 times a day.

You might work out more of what happened if you uncomment that helpful looking line:

//print_r($resultArray);

by removing the // at the beginning of line.

Answer 2

I don't think this is a problem with your code, but more the fact that Twitter is phasing out basic authentication support and moving to OAuth.

There's more information at http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Authentication.

Answer 3

You can't use API with basic authentication since 31 august 2010. You can use a small spider function with curl that login in, fetch your home, and tweet. I made it: http://www.barattalo.it/2010/09/09/how-to-change-twitter-status-with-php-and-curl-without-oauth/ If you don't want to use oAuth authentication model you have to do this way.