How to Read Twitter Feeds With LINQ to XML

Twitter feeds are provided in RSS XML format. This makes it very easy for us to parse out the information we want from a feed using LINQ to XML. For example, if we want to grab the message and date of each Twitter entry, we could use something like this:

public class Twitter
{
    public string Message { get; set; }
    public DateTime PubDate { get; set; }

    public static List<Twitter> Parse(string User)
    {
        var rv = new List<Twitter>();
        var url = "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/" + User + ".rss";
 
        var element = XElement.Load(url);
        foreach (var node in element.Element("channel").Elements("item"))
        {
            var twit = new Twitter();
            var message = node.Element("description").Value;

            //remove username information
            twit.Message = message.Replace(User + ": ", string.Empty);
            twit.PubDate = DateTime.Parse(node.Element("pubDate").Value);
            rv.Add(twit);
        }

        return rv;
    }
}

You can get the Twitter feeds by using the following:

var fromTwitter = Twitter.Parse("Merlin981");