Get twitter follower count in php

Twitter API 1.0 is deprecated and is no longer active. With the REST 1.1 API, you need oAuth authentication to retrieve data from Twitter.

<?php 
require_once( 'TwitterAPIExchange.php' ); //get it from https://github.com/J7mbo/twitter-api-php

/** Set access tokens here - see: https://dev.twitter.com/apps/ **/
$settings = array(
	'oauth_access_token' 		=> "YOUR_OAUTH_ACCESS_TOKEN",
	'oauth_access_token_secret' => "YOUR_OAUTH_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET",
	'consumer_key' 				=> "YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY",
	'consumer_secret' 			=> "YOUR_CONSUMER_SECRET"
);

$ta_url = 'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json';
$getfield = '?screen_name=SwatantraKumar'; //'?screen_name=REPLACE_ME';
$requestMethod = 'GET';
$twitter = new TwitterAPIExchange( $settings );
$follow_count = $twitter->setGetfield( $getfield )
						->buildOauth( $ta_url, $requestMethod )
						->performRequest();
$data = json_decode( $follow_count, true );
$followers_count = $data[0]['user']['followers_count'];
echo $followers_count;
?>

Parsing the XML

<?php 
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement( urlencode( strip_tags( 'https://twitter.com/users/google.xml' ) ), null, true );
echo "Follower count: ".$xml->followers_count;
?>