Twitter Lib

Stand alone Twitter library for open API calls using JavaScript

twitterlib.js allows you to run a number of common API calls to Twitter, set the options in a standard format, and pass a filtering search string if required.

Live example of this library being used in anger is the Full Frontal JavaScript Conference 2009 twitter wall. This example combines search and list calls in to one constant stream.

API methods

All API methods are called with:

twitterlib[METHOD](subject, options, callback)

Note that the twitterlib library returns itself in all the API methods (and the next method) so you can chain calls.

favs - favourites for a user
list - status for members of list, subject is in the format: screen_name/list_id
search - calls a search request (limited by Twitter to 10 days), with all the result fields normalised to match the "twitter API"
status - single status for a user, result is in an array
timeline - timeline for a user
retweets - retweets by a particular user

Options

filter - Twitter search filter syntax, e.g. '-RT OR -via', filters against the results
limit - numerical, limit the number of results the API returns
page - numerical, the page of results

Callback

The API call with only run if a callback is passed. Once the API call has finished, it will execute the callback passing in the results from Twitter in an array format.

The context of the callback is set to the twitterlib library (so logging out this will show the twitterlib object).

The second argument to the callback is the options being used on the method call.

twitterlib.timeline('rem', { filter: 'snapbird OR "snap bird"' }, function (tweets, options) {
  document.querySelector('#tweet').innerHTML = twitterlib.render(tweets[0]);
  alert('This is page ' + options.page + ', using filter: ' + options.filter);

  if (options.page == 1) {
    this.next(); // repeats the call
  }
});

Utility Methods:

refresh - re-executes the last twitterlib request - useful for updating a static block of tweets
next - executes the last method called incrementing the page number and firing the same callback
filter - stand alone filter based on Twitter's search filter syntax
ify - object to linkify and "at"ify tweets, example usage below
render - returns HTML <li> markup in a common format based on twitter.com's list of tweets
reset - removes the next method, and removes all debug settings
time - to access relative help formatting the twitter time to a relative time
debug - see debugging section

Example

var count = 0, limit = 2;
twitterlib.timeline('rem', { limit: 5 }, function (tweets) {
  for (var i = 0; i < tweets.length; i++) {
    console.log(this.ify.clean(tweets[i].text));
  }

  count++;
  if (count < limit) {
    this.next();
  }
});

Debugging

Twitterlib includes a debug method to redirect API calls to your own test data, useful if you need to repetitively test your code and you don't want to get rate blocked by Twitter.

You can redirect each of the API methods (favs, list, search, status and timeline) by passing an object to the debug method. The key is the method you wish to override, and the value is the URL to replace the call with.

For example, this repository includes some test data in the test directory. Included are 9 search result hits named search1.json, search2.json and so on.

Within the files the result is being passed to a predefined callback called callback, i.e.

<strong>callback</strong>({"results":[{"profile_image_url":"http://a3.twimg.com/profile_images/.....

Note that the number in the filename match the page numbers, so this can be a variable in our debug URL.

To override the search call with our own predefined data (as seen the test/api.html example), I use:

twitterlib.debug({ search: 'test-data/search%page%.json?callback=callback' });

Now search method calls will return search1.json for the first page, then search2.json for the second page, and so on.

To change another method, I can call the debug method again, or I can do it all at once:

twitterlib.debug({ 
  search: 'test-data/search%page%.json?callback=callback',
  list: 'test-data/list%page%.json?callback=callback' 
});

If I've finished debugging and need to switch from debug mode to live mode during runtime (this is unlikely during production, but perhaps useful during development), you call the reset method:

twitterlib.reset();