PHP – Verifying Twitter Credentials using fsock

For all of my Twitter web applications, I have had to verify that the provided login details for a Twitter account are valid. I have used this method for The Re-Revtwter Bot, Twitter Train - TwooTwoo and more recently, The Mass Tweet Lottery.
Without being able to validate the credentials, floods of accounts could be added, and the dont even necessarly have to be theirs.

I have provided a simple function in PHP using fsocks, which will work on 99.99% of servers. The current available methods require cURL, which not all servers support. Read the full article for the function and usage!

Provided below is the function to verify.

 
public function verifyCredentials($username, $password){
 
$out="GET http://twitter.com/account/verify_credentials.xml HTTP/1.1\r\n"
  ."Host: twitter.com\r\n"
  ."Authorization: Basic ".base64_encode ($username.":".$password)."\r\n"
  ."Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n"
  ."Connection: Close\r\n\r\n";
 
$fp = fsockopen ('twitter.com', 80);
fwrite ($fp, $out);
$buf = fread($fp, 1024);
fclose ($fp);
 $pos = strpos($buf,'Could not');
  if ($pos === false){
  return 1;
}else{
  return 0;
    }
}
 

It returns 1 if valid, 0 if invalid.
You can do a simple check like this:

 
$twitterusername = 'Myusername';
$twitterpassword = 'mypass123';
if (verifyCredentials($twitterusername,$twitterpassword) == 0){
echo 'INVALID LOGIN DETAILS!';
}else{
echo 'VALID!';
}
 

Any questions/problems? Just ask.