Twitter Search via C#

While there are some examples of accessing the Twitter API via C# on the web, I couldn’t really find any good samples of how to do a search.  There were some examples that took the REST route and used raw http requests.  While others explored the JSON formatting capabilities of the twitter API.  In the end, I didn’t really care for a lot of the code I saw, and I wasn’t really concerned with what format I got the results in, just that I got the results.

After a bit of fiddling about, I decided to use the ATOM format, and the SyndicationFeed API that came with WCF.  I came up with this simple command line tool that lets you type a search query, and it’ll list the top 10 results.  The code is quite short and simple to understand.

    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.Write("twitter -> ");
            var input = Console.ReadLine();

            while (input != "exit")
            {
                var scrubbed = HttpUtility.UrlEncode(input);
                var reader = XmlReader.Create(
                     string.Format("http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?lang=en&q={0}", scrubbed));
                var feed = SyndicationFeed.Load(reader);

                foreach (SyndicationItem item in feed.Items)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("\t{0} - {1}", item.Authors[0].Name, item.Title.Text);
                }

                Console.Write("\ntwitter -> ");
                input = Console.ReadLine();
            }
        }
    }

To use it, you just need to add references to System.ServiceModel.dll, and System.Web.dll.

Enjoy!