I started out with your stylesheet actually, but eventually I got to annoyed at all the effort that XSLT takes for very simple cases like this one.

The deciding factor was JSON + dynamic language, so Ruby would work as well as Perl here; I guess it would look cleaner at the expense of a longer command. (Python’s not much for one-liners, however.) Of course you’d ultimately put this in a script, so that’s neither here nor there.

As for the spamminess, that was probably because somehow all the underscores in my code block got turned into _ character references, and ASCII characters spelled as NCRs is a popular filter blinding technique. (On both sides of the war, actually – we use it against spammers too, c.f. mailto: hiding.)

% curl -k -u randomphrase:shh -o tweets-#1.json ...
zsh: no matches found: tweets-#1.json
% curl -k -u randomphrase:shh -o tweets-\#1.json ...
[...]
% perl -MJSON::XS -E'...' -- tweets-* | json_xs
zsh: command not found: json_xs
Can't locate JSON/XS.pm in @INC (@INC contains: ... )
.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted.

Despite the snarky comment above, yes it does work nicely after installing libjson-xs-perl.

Another nice to have would be to resolve shortened URLs – this is probably a lot easier to do in Perl than XSLT…

BTW: Your comment was marked as “Very Spammy” by Defensio, and had to be manually rescued. This makes me sad.

1. You can use [01-32] instead of [1-32] to get filenames with correctly sorting names and with the -o switch you can clean up the filenames further.
2. You can download JSON rather than XML.

Bottom line:

curl -k -u user:pass -o tweets-#1.json 'https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.json?count=100&page=[01-32]'
perl -MJSON::XS -E'@s=map{local@ARGV=$_;@{decode_json<>}}@ARGV;delete@{$_}{qw(user source)}for@s;say encode_json\@s' -- tweets-* | json_xs

Tad easier…