Is there a way to get the twitter share count for a specific URL?

Question

I looked through the API documentation but couldn\'t find it. It would be nice to grab that number to see how popular a url is. Engadget uses the twitter share button on a

Answer 1

I know that is an old question but for me the url http://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://stackoverflow.com did not work in ajax calls due to Cross-origin issues.

I solved using PHP CURL, I made a custom route and called it through ajax.

  /* Other Code */
  $options = array(
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,   // return web page
    CURLOPT_HEADER         => false,  // don't return headers
    CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,   // follow redirects
    CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS      => 10,     // stop after 10 redirects
    CURLOPT_ENCODING       => "",     // handle compressed
    CURLOPT_USERAGENT      => "test", // name of client
    CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER    => true,   // set referrer on redirect
    CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 120,    // time-out on connect
    CURLOPT_TIMEOUT        => 120,    // time-out on response
);
$url = $_POST["url"]; //whatever you need
if($url !== ""){
    $curl = curl_init("http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=".$url);
    curl_setopt_array($curl, $options);
    $result = curl_exec($curl);
    curl_close($curl);
    echo json_encode(json_decode($result)); //whatever response you need
}

It is important to use a POST because passsing url in GET request cause issues.

Hope it helped.