How can cURL be effectively used to retrieve Twitter data, such as follower count, in PHP scripts?

To retrieve Twitter data, such as follower count, in PHP scripts, you can use cURL to make API requests to the Twitter API. You will need to obtain API credentials from Twitter Developer platform and authenticate your requests using OAuth. Once authenticated, you can make a GET request to the appropriate endpoint to retrieve the follower count. 

<?php

$twitterUsername = 'example_username';
$apiUrl = "https://api.twitter.com/1.1/users/show.json?screen_name=$twitterUsername";

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $apiUrl);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

$headers = array(
    'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_BEARER_TOKEN'
);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);

$result = curl_exec($ch);
$data = json_decode($result, true);

if(isset($data['followers_count'])){
    echo "Follower count for $twitterUsername: " . $data['followers_count'];
} else {
    echo "Unable to retrieve follower count.";
}

curl_close($ch);

?>

Keywords

cURL Twitter data follower count PHP scripts retrieval

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