Minor Twitget Improvement

I noticed today that the Twitter feed over there was not displaying my tweets properly. Specifically, any links are displayed using the t.co URL structure which Twitter uses. I’d fixed this once before for the old feed, I figured it was worth investigating to see if I could fix it in the new one.

As it happens, the modification is pretty trivial, with only a few lines of code added in 1 source file.

The file to modify is twitget.php. Start by changing the function process_links to look like the following:

function process_links($text, $new, $urls) {
    if($new) {
        $linkmarkup = '<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="';
        $text = preg_replace('/@(\w+)/', '<a href="http://twitter.com/$1" target="_blank">@$1</a>', $text);
        $text = preg_replace('/\s#(\w+)/', '<a href="http://twitter.com/search?q=%23$1&src=hash" target="_blank">#$1</a>', $text);
    }
    else {
        $linkmarkup = '<a rel="nofollow" href="';
        $text = preg_replace('/@(\w+)/', '<a href="http://twitter.com/$1">@$1</a>', $text);
        $text = preg_replace('/\s#(\w+)/', '<a href="http://twitter.com/search?q=%23$1&src=hash">#$1</a>', $text);              
    }
    if (!empty($urls))
        foreach($urls as $url){
            $find = $url['url'];
            $replace = $linkmarkup.$find.'">'.$url['expanded_url'].'</a>';
            $text = str_replace($find, $replace, $text);
        }
    return $text;
}

Here, we’ve added the argument $urls, which will come from the entities field of the tweet data. This data is used to create the appropriate anchor markup, in the foreach loop. The actual link URL is maintained, while the display URL is changed to the expanded_url field supplied by the entities information. Note I’ve also modified the replacement string for hashtag searches, adding &src=hash to the href attribute in the achor tag.

Now we need to add the entity data to the function calls. Search for the process_links function within the file. There were only two instances of it used in my version. Add the third parameter to the function calls as follows:

$link_processed = process_links($whole_tweet, $options['links_new_window'], $tweet['entities']['urls'])

That third parameter should be added to every invocation of process_links. That provides the URL information to make our earlier changes work.

That’s it. Save the file and Tweets should now display the proper link text, while still linking to the t.co URL’s as specified by Twitter’s guidelines.