Check if twitter username exists

Question

Is there a way to check if a twitter username exists? Without being authenticated with OAuth or the twitter basic authentication?

Answer 1

According to the api docs you can pass an email address to the user/ show method, I would assume that if a user didn't exist you'd get back a 404, which should allow you to determine whether or not the user exists.

eg: http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?email=t...@example.com

result if not exist :

 
 
  /users/show.xml?email=tur...@example.com 
  Not found