PHP function to get the number of twitter followers

The following code snippet will fetch the number of twitter followers of a given twitter username

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/*     This function will fetch the number of twitter followers of a twitter id     It works by fetching an xml page for the user's information */   function get_followers($twitter_id) {     $xml = file_get_contents('http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?screen_name='.$twitter_id);           $s = simplexml_load_string($xml);           $follower_count = $s->followers_count;           return $follower_count; }   /*     Enter your twitter id here to test the code */ $twitter_id = 'linux';   echo "$twitter_id has ". get_followers($twitter_id) . ' twitter followers';