Update Twitter status programmatically with PHP and cURL

function twitterUpdate($u, $p, $upd) {
	// $u is your username (string)
	// $p is your password (string)
	// $upd is your status update (string)

	$url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml';

	$curl_handle = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "status=".$upd);
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $u.":".$p);
	$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
	curl_close($curl_handle);

	if (empty($buffer)) {
		return 'fail';
	}
	else {
		return 'success';
	}
}

Example usage is below.

$u='username';
$p='password';
$upd='Hello world!';

$twitterUpdateResult = twitterUpdate($u, $p, $upd);

echo $twitterUpdateResult;