PHP RESTful Request

Here is a CURL GET request script.  If you want to post the URL of the site's API, I'll be glad to show you how to read and interpret the data from the API.

See http://www.laprbass.com/RAY_curl_get_example.php

<?php // RAY_curl_get_example.php
error_reporting(E_ALL);

// DEMONSTRATE THE BASICS OF CURL

// SINCE IT IS ON MY SERVER, I HAVE HARD-CODED THIS URL
$url = 'https://twitter.com/RayPaseur';

// TRY THE REMOTE WEB SERVICE
$htm = my_curl($url);

// SHOW THE WORK PRODUCT OR BARK OUT ERROR MESSAGES
echo "<pre>";
echo PHP_EOL . '<strong>' . $url . '</strong>';
echo PHP_EOL . htmlentities($htm);
echo PHP_EOL;


// A FUNCTION TO RUN A CURL-GET CLIENT CALL TO A FOREIGN SERVER
function my_curl
( $url
, $timeout=3
, $error_report=TRUE
)
{
    $curl = curl_init();

    // HEADERS AND OPTIONS APPEAR TO BE A FIREFOX BROWSER REFERRED BY GOOGLE
    $header[] = "Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5";
    $header[] = "Cache-Control: max-age=0";
    $header[] = "Connection: keep-alive";
    $header[] = "Keep-Alive: 300";
    $header[] = "Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7";
    $header[] = "Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5";
    $header[] = "Pragma: "; // BROWSERS USUALLY LEAVE THIS BLANK

    // SET THE CURL OPTIONS - SEE http://php.net/manual/en/function.curl-setopt.php
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_URL,            $url  );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT,      'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.6) Gecko/20091201 Firefox/3.5.6'  ); // ANCIENT HISTORY
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT,      'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:13.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/13.0.1'  );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER,     $header  );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_REFERER,        'http://www.google.com'  );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_ENCODING,       'gzip,deflate'  );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER,    TRUE  );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE  );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE  );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,        $timeout  );

    // RUN THE CURL REQUEST AND GET THE RESULTS
    $htm = curl_exec($curl);

    // ON FAILURE HANDLE ERROR MESSAGE
    if ($htm === FALSE)
    {
        if ($error_report)
        {
            $err = curl_errno($curl);
            $inf = curl_getinfo($curl);
            echo "CURL FAIL: $url TIMEOUT=$timeout, CURL_ERRNO=$err";
            var_dump($inf);
        }
        curl_close($curl);
        return FALSE;
    }

    // ON SUCCESS RETURN XML / HTML STRING
    curl_close($curl);
    return $htm;
}

Select allOpen in new window

HTH, ~Ray

Is this useful?

<?php
function getXML($xml, $url, $timeout=30, $encode=true)
{
  $curl = curl_init($url);
  
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_NOSIGNAL, 1);
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION, CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1);
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $timeout);
// When you want to post
//  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $xml);
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT    5.0'); 
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, FALSE);
  
  $http = curl_exec($curl); 
  $info = curl_getinfo($curl);

  curl_close($curl);
  $xml = new SimpleXMLElement(html_entity_decode($http));
  
  return $xml;
}

$xml = <<<XML
<request>
  <type>timesfive</type>
  <value>10</value>
</request>
XML;

$xml = getXml($xml, 'http://server/getxml.php');
echo $xml->result;
?>

Select allOpen in new window

Hi Ray,

Thanks for the response, I haven;t got time to try it right now but will do tomorrow.

Am not sure though that's exactly what I am looking for since there is no mention of setting up the user name and password for the request.

The application I am using is not publicly available so there would be no way of you testing it.

Thanks again.

Simon

In a RESTful interface, you make an atomic request.  The arguments usually go into the URL and since this is a GET method request, it might look like this:

http://url?u=USER&p=PASS

The URL might also look like this for HTTP authentication.  We would really need to see the API documentation to know how to give you more guidance.

https://USER:PASS@url?q=QUERY

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer

Hi,

I managed to track down the issue to a DNS issue between my web server and application server by using the curl -v command at the command line.

So now I have a working connection between my web server and application server using the following code.

<?php
	$ch = curl_init();
		
	curl_setopt_array(
		$ch, 
		array(
			CURLOPT_URL => 'http://10.10.10.10/<URI>',
			CURLOPT_PORT => '8080',
			CURLOPT_USERPWD => '<USER>:<PASSWORD>',
			CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH => CURLAUTH_BASIC,
			CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
			//CURLOPT_HEADER => true
		)
	);
	$response = curl_exec($ch);
	curl_close($ch);
		
	echo '<pre>';
	$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($response);
	print_r($xml);
?>

Select allOpen in new window

This produces the following result.

SimpleXMLElement Object
(
    [@attributes] => Array
        (
            [total-servers] => 1
        )

    [server] => SimpleXMLElement Object
        (
            [id] => 0x100000
            [name] => server-1
            [isPrimary] => true
            [Version] => 9.0
        )

)

Select allOpen in new window

So my question now is how I access these elements. Looking around on the web it would seem most people are suggestion a "foreach" loop. However I cannot get this to produce any results. Ideally I would need to assign these elements to variables for future use and in all likely hood not print these out in the web browser.

Many thanks.