Finding your most popular Tweets

Terence Eden — Wed, 13 May 2020 11:02:57 +0000

Twitter's search interface has all sorts of lovely and obscure options.

My three favourites are "min_retweets:", "min_replies:", and "min_faves:"

Using those filters, you can create a search for Tweets which meet a certain threshold. For example, here are my Tweets which have been liked more than 500 times:

twitter.com/search?q=from:edent min_faves:500

Here are the ones which have been retweeted 300 times with at least 100 replies:

twitter.com/search?q=from%:edent min_replies:100 min_retweets:100

Of course, you don't have to do this for your own Tweets. You can perform the search on any term, or any user.

Remove the first few lines from a string in PHP

Terence Eden — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 08:31:07 +0000

Problem: I have a multiline string - not a file - and I want to remove the first few lines from it and keep the rest. I found this surprisingly unintuitive. So these are notes in case I want to do it again. Feel free to suggest a better way!

Example

Given this input:

$str = "Once upon\nA Time\nLived a big\nDragon\nCalled Cuthbert.";

I want the output to be:

"Dragon\nCalled Cuthbert."

That is, remove the first X lines in a string.

Exploding kittens

Using explode() converts a string into an array based on a delimiter character.

If limit is set and positive, the returned array will contain a maximum of limit elements with the last element containing the rest of string.

This code removes the first three lines and keeps the rest

$str = explode("\n", $str, 4)[3];

Here's a way to visualise what's going on:

$str = "1\n2\n3\n4\n5\n6";
print_r(explode("\n", $str, 4));

Outputs:

Array
(
    [0] => 1
    [1] => 2
    [2] => 3
    [3] => 4\n5\n6
)

What not to do...

Loop through the string, counting the instances of \n and then substringing based on that position.
Write the string to a file and then read it line by line.

tip – Terence Eden’s Blog

Finding your most popular Tweets

Remove the first few lines from a string in PHP

Example

Exploding kittens

What not to do...