Twittering Around in Ruby
Written on 6:37:00 PM by S. Potter
I just spent 2 minutes hacking around with twitter.com and thought I would share since a friend of mine wanted to use twitter to automate a few tasks for his websites in a similar vain to Urban Dictionary's use of twitter:
require 'net/http'
require 'uri'
require 'json'
HOST='twitter.com'
PORT=80
URI='/statuses/friends_timeline.json'
Net::HTTP.start(HOST, PORT) do |http|
request = Net::HTTP::Get.new(URI)
request.basic_auth('login', 'password')
response = http.request(request)
#Do something with the response.
puts "Code: #{response.code}"
puts "Message: #{response.message}"
puts "Body:\n #{response.body}"
# to parse the JSON do something like:
#hash = JSON.parse(response.body)
#and then do something with it.
end
Prep work before you run this Ruby code is:
$ sudo gem install jsonWARNING: The fastest Rails application on the web, Twitter aint! I tried running against SSL, but got timed out too many times to test. Though if you aren't having problems you can try the SSL version of the code:
require 'net/https'
require 'uri'
require 'json'
HOST='twitter.com'
PORT=443
URI='/statuses/friends_timeline.json'
http = Net::HTTP.new(HOST, PORT)
http.use_ssl = true
http.start do |http|
request = Net::HTTP::Get.new(URI)
request.basic_auth('login', 'password')
response = http.request(request)
#Do something with the response.
puts "Code: #{response.code}"
puts "Message: #{response.message}"
puts "Body:\n #{response.body}"
# to parse the JSON do something like:
#hash = JSON.parse(response.body)
#and then do something with it.
end
You will get a warning when running it like the following:
warning: peer certificate won't be verified in this SSL sessionThough if you refer to the Net::HTTP rdoc you will find how to work with this if you wish. I should also mention that you can edit the URI to the following values to get at different types of data:
/statuses/public_timeline.json- JSON representation of public timeline on twitter/statuses/friends.json- JSON representation of friends and their current messages on twitter/statuses/followers.json- JSON representation of your followers and current messages on twitter
- By substituting .json with .xml twitter will send back XML format.
- /statuses/update.json can be used in a HTTP POST request sent with a status=message+url+encoded name-value pair to update your own status. To accomplish this you will just need to swap out the
request = Net::HTTP::GET.newline of code with something like the following:request = Net::HTTP::Post.new(URI, {'status' => 'my new message'})
Posted in
json,
REST,
ROA,
ruby,
twitter,
web 2.0,
web services
