Why a wrong tweet id is returned from twitter API?

Question

I use twitter API to retrieve the user home timeline tweets. I use json response format. Recently the tweet id (in API it is just 'id') are retuned wrong. As an example

normally it should return like this: "id": 14057503720, (example is from twitter console) however at my request it is returned like this: "id": 1172601832

It is 1 digit less and it is totally different. I need the proper ID because I can't make use of the parameters like since_id or max_id.

Answer 1

Use id_str instead of id. It doesn't seem to be documented, but if you look at the raw source of the JSON you can see that id_str for each tweet is the one that correctly corresponds to the ID of the tweet.

Answer 2

It is 1 digit less and it is totally different. I need the proper ID because I can't make use of the parameters like since_id or max_id.

It is not totally different; just different. If you write both IDs in hex, you'll receive

0x345E47BE8
 0x45E47BE8

Tweet IDs are 64-bit and somewhere in parsing you lose the most significant 32-bit half of it. Use id_str as other (also in the linked article) suggest.

Answer 3

"[ambiguity around the encoding of numbers in textual formats] is a problem when dealing with large numbers; for example, integers greater than 2^53 cannot be exactly represented in a IEEE 754 double-precision floating-point number, so such numbers become inaccurate when parsed in a language that uses floating-point numbers (such as JavaScript). An example of numbers larger than 253 occurs on Twitter, which uses a 64-bit number to identify each tweet. The JSON returned by Twitter’s API includes tweet IDs twice, once as a JSON number and once as a decimal string, to work around the fact that the numbers are not correctly parsed by JavaScript applications"

From "Designing Data Intensive Applications" by Martin Kleppmann

Answer 4

example of how to get the ID

$url = "http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=QUERY"; //<--- replace the word QUERY for your own query 
$data = get_data($url);
$obj = json_decode($data);

function get_data($url){
    $ch = curl_init();
    $timeout = 5;
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,$timeout);
    $data = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    return $data;
    }

foreach ($obj->results as $item){
    $text = $item->text;
    $user = $item-> from_user;
    $img = $item->profile_image_url;
    $tweetId = $item->id_str;  // <--- On this line we are getting the ID of the tweet

echo ' @';  
echo $user;
echo $text;
echo 'Tweet ID: '. $tweetId; //<-- On this line we display the ID of the tweet

For more information GET search | Twitter Developers

The example request on the line 30 shows "id_str":"122032448266698752" and thats the reason of use $tweetId = $item->id_str; to get the id_str