website query, php

Question

Hi, How can I query a particular website with some fields and get the results to my webpage using php?

let say website xyz.com will give you the name of the city if you give them the zipcode. How can I acehive this easliy in php? any code snap shot will be great.

Answer 1

Do you mean something like:

include 'http://www.google.com?q=myquery'; ? or which fields do you want to get?

Can you be a bit more specific pls :)

Answer 2

If I understand what you mean (You want to submit a query to a site and get the result back for processing and such?), you can use cURL.

Here is an example:

<?php 
    // create curl resource 
    $ch = curl_init(); 

    // set url 
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "example.com"); 

    //return the transfer as a string 
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); 

    // $output contains the output string 
    $output = curl_exec($ch); 

    // close curl resource to free up system resources 
    curl_close($ch);
?>

You can grab the Lat/Long from this site with some regexp like this:

if ( preg_match_all( "#<td>\s+-?(\d+\.\d+)\s+</td>#", $output, $coords ) ) {
    list( $lat, $long ) = $coords[1];
    echo "Latitude: $lat\nLongitude: $long\n";
}

Just put that after the curl_close() function. That will return something like this (numbers changed):

Latitude: 53.5100
Longitude: 60.2200

Answer 3

If you want to import the html to your page and analyze it, you probably want to use cURL. You have to have the extensions loaded to your page (it's usually part of PHP _ I think it has to be compiled in? The manual can answer that)

Here is a curl function. Set up your url like

$param='fribby';

$param2='snips';

$url="www.example.com?data=$param&data2=$param2";

function curl_page($url) { $response =false; $ch = curl_init($url); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_FAILONERROR,true); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION,1); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,30); $response = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); return $response; }

$page_data=curl_page($url);

Then, you can get data out of the page using the DOM parsing or grep/sed/awk type stuff.

Answer 4

You can use file_get_contents (and other similar fopen-class functions) to do this:

$result = file_get_contents("http://other-site.com/query?variable=value");