使用twitter api和部分字符串进行用户名搜索

I am new to Twitter Api and want to use it to make username search. Simply let's say I search for "john" and I would like to have as results john, johnas, johnathan, john1980,…and so on. I've tried to use the user/search but it does not give me what I've described. I think I need the correct way to write the search query using wildcard understandable from Twitter api. I am using php code getting inspired from "A Bright Worker" in Twitter API returns error 215, Bad Authentication Data. Please is there somebody with some hints ?