Twitter Search API, tweet IDs, json_decode, & bigint

Today I realized that my Tweet parsing application was saving a bunch of floating numbers as the status ID. After some investigation I realized that Twitter changed their

parameter in the Search API response to use a

. Since our data was returned using JSON, PHP’s native

automatically converts the ID to a floating point value, like

. Not cool.

If you are finding you’re having this problem when using

in general, and you’re running a development version of PHP 5.3+, you can use the bitmask

in your

call to output any bigints as a string.

Example usage:

json_decode($json, false, 512, JSON_BIGINT_AS_STRING);

Anyway Twitter has now added an

field in the search response. So if you’re using PHP and you need to store or output the status ID, you should use this value instead:

{
    from_user_id_str: "52138619"
    profile_image_url: http://a3.twimg.com/profile_images/403904047/BC_color_logo_normal.jpg
    created_at: "Sat, 13 Nov 2010 03:00:56 +0000"
    from_user: "BCSportsNews"
    id_str: "3281128077139968"
    metadata: {
        result_type: "recent"
    }
    to_user_id: null
    text: "MSOC: North Carolina has defeated Boston College, 1-0, to advance to the ACC Championship game."
    id: 3281128077139968
    from_user_id: 52138619
    geo: null
    iso_language_code: "en"
    to_user_id_str: null
    source: "<a href="http://twitter.com/">web</a>"
}