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Monday, October 24, 2011

Twitter has a very rich API, but there are situations when you need to do a very simple thing: show last N twitter records authored by a certain Twitter user. How would we do that as simply as we can using .NET and LINQ?

// First create the request string. Put actual twitter account name instead of 'username'. You can also specify how
// many of the last records to retrieve 
string TwitterRequest = "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=username&count=5"; 
// Download the data in string
WebClient wc = new WebClient(); 
string TwitterResponse = wc.DownloadString(TwitterRequest); 
// Parse the string and put the data into XDocument
XDocument doc = new XDocument(); 
doc = XDocument.Parse(TwitterResponse); 
// Make a LINQ query - here we just need to get the first record
var q = from tw in doc.Descendants("status") 
        select tw;
/// Get the text of the tweet
if (q.Count() > 0)
{
    XElement xe = q.First();
    string twitter_text = xe.Element("text").Value;
    string twitter_date = xe.Element("created_at").Value
}

It's also worth mentioning that Twitter provides the 'date created' field in a format, that is not appropriate for direct conversion to DateTime data type. The date and time in a format like this 'Mon Oct 24 22:52:51 +0000 2011' will require certain string manipulation and splitting parts of the date/time before plugging into DateTime.

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