I was talking with Tom at BarCampLondon2 and he suggested that it would be useful to be able to get a list of direct messages for a given user. I was having issues with the Regex for doing this on the night (my older version of RegexBuddy -- best damn Regex tool in the universe -- and PHP weren't getting along) but I've since updated RegexBuddy to its latest version and added a new method call to TwitAPI called getDirectMessages.

It returns an array of objects (or an XML doc, depending on your method of access) with the following properties for each direct message:

• messsageID: ID of the message.
• senderUserName: User name of user who sent the message.
• senderUserId: User ID of the user who sent the message.
• senderProfileImageName: Name of the user's profile image (untested with users without image names -- don't rely heavily on this, I might remove it.)
• message: The actual text of the direct message.
• sent: When the message was sent (may be in the "X minutes ago" format or a timestamp depending on how it is returned by Twitter.)

Usage instructions:

JSON

http://aralbalkan.com/twitapi/json.php/Twitter.getDirectMessages/userName/passWord

XML

http://aralbalkan.com/twitapi/get_direct_messages_xml.php?user=userName&pass=passWord

Flash Remoting

Check out the AMFPHP service browser.

The A new method for TwitAPI: getDirectMessages article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.