Twitter streaming php decoder breaks out individual tweets

This code was adapted (i.e. stolen verbatim) from a stackoverflow post by drew010

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10337984/using-the-curl-output

Here’s the code. It solves a huge problem for the class of projects which need to grab a large amount of tweets in real time to either save in a database, or trigger some action.

My version of the code is in tkzic/api/twitterStream1.php

<?php

$USERNAME = 'youruser';
$PASSWORD = 'yourpass';
$QUERY    = 'nike';

/**
 * Called every time a chunk of data is read, this will be a json encoded message
 * 
 * @param resource $handle The curl handle
 * @param string   $data   The data chunk (json message)
 */
function writeCallback($handle, $data)
{
    /*
    echo "-----------------------------------------------------------\n";
    echo $data;
    echo "-----------------------------------------------------------\n";
    */

    $json = json_decode($data);
    if (isset($json->user) && isset($json->text)) {
        echo "@{$json->user->screen_name}: {$json->text}\n\n";
    }

    return strlen($data);
}

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/filter.json?track=' . urlencode($QUERY));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$USERNAME:$PASSWORD");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION, 'writeCallback');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 20); // disconnect after 20 seconds for testing
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);  // debugging
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING,  'gzip, deflate'); // req'd to get gzip
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'tstreamer/1.0'); // req'd to get gzip

curl_exec($ch); // commence streaming

$info = curl_getinfo($ch);

var_dump($info);