jQuery: get the retweet count using the Twitter's API

Maybe you don't know that you can get the retweet count for a given URL using only the Twitter's API. In this article we'll see how to achieve this result by using jQuery and a little help from PHP.

The base Twitter's API URL is as follows:

http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=

The url parameter is a valid full URL. The returned JSON object has a count property which contains the number of retweets for the provided URL.

First we need a PHP proxy to fetch the remote JSON file:

<?php
header('Content-Type: application/json');
$url = $_GET['url'];

if(filter_var($url, FILTER_VALIDATE_URL)) {
	$baseURL = 'http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=';
	$json = file_get_contents($baseURL . $url);
	echo $json;
}

exit();
?>

Then we can use jQuery:

$(function() {
	var button = $('#get'),
		output = $('#count');
	button.on('click', function() {
         var url = 'http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2013/02/27/css-form-elements-problem/';
         $.getJSON('twitter-url.php', { url: url }, function(json) {
              output.text(json.count);

         });

	});

});

You can see the example in the following video.