Implementing oauth twitter search in C# and JSON

To implement twitter search in C# that uses oauth for authentication, first we need a C# oauth implementation, and a JSON parser for extracting results. For oauth implementation I’m using Twitter oAuth with .NET by Shannon whitley and for parsing the results JSON parser by Procurious and i have to say that this post is just a bit refined implementation of Parsing Twitter JSON data in C# by Jamie’s Digital Blog.

To get started with twitter needs you to authenticate your application before you could use twitter API’s search feature, to authenticate an application needs to initialize a oAuthTwitter object so that it is accessible through out the class like

	oAuthTwitter oauth = new oAuthTwitter();
	//Replace the vlues with the one's provided by twitter
	oauth.ConsumerKey = "Your-twitter-oauth-consumerkey";
	oauth.ConsumerSecret = "Your-twitter-oauth-consumersecret";
	//Launches your default browser for requesting //authentication
	System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(oauth.AuthorizationLinkGet());
	//Copy the pin provided after you authenticating and save to a string
	//I am assuming you store it in a string twitterpin
	//Now the real authentication takes place
	//you will exchange the authtoken and pin for Access token
	oauth.AccessTokenGet(oauth.OAuthToken, twitterpin);
	//remember twitterpin is the object in which we stored the //pin value

view raw OauthTwitterInitilizeDemo.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Now since we have obtained the authentication we can use this oAuth to search twitter

	//Replace the term search_keyword with a term you want to search
	//rpp=100 in the url means results per page is 100, and lang=en means
	//Language is english
	string result = oauth.oAuthWebRequest(oAuthTwitter.Method.GET, "http://search.twitter.com/search.json", "q=" + search_keyword + "&rpp=100&lang=en");

view raw OAuthTwitterQueryDemo.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Now we have the 100 search results stored in a string result in JSON format, we will use JSON parser for extracting the values of each tweet

	//The following code is a straight copy from jamiedigi.com
	HashTable jsonHash = (Hashtable)JSON.JsonDecode(jsonCode);
	ArrayList jsonResults = (ArrayList)jsonHash["results"];
	foreach (object objResult in jsonResults)
	{
	Hashtable jsonResult = (Hashtable)objResult;
	System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("User ID: "
	+ jsonResult["from_user_id"].ToString());
	System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("Tweet text: "
	+ jsonResult["text"].ToString());
	System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("Tweet date: "
	+ jsonResult["created_at"].ToString());
	System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("User name: "
	+ jsonResult["from_user"].ToString());
	System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("Language: "
	+ jsonResult["iso_language_code"].ToString())
	}

view raw OAuthTwitterProcessResultsDemo.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

You can download the complete source code along with oauth and JSON parser implementations from https://sites.google.com/site/coderbuddy/myReserach.zip?attredirects=0&d=1

You may need to make some modifications to the code like providing the consumer key and consumer secret before working with the code