16 Jul 10 Passing PHP variable data through POST

Recently, I was developing an API for a PHP application I’d built, to be utilized by other php programmers. Essentially, the php programmer passes a load of data to our API though a POST variable. This is as follows:

$api->process($to_process, $data, $opt1, $opt2);

$to_process is an array, as follows;

$to_process = Array( Array(“FOO”, “BAR”, 1, 2), Array(“BAR”, “FOO”, 5, 3), Array(“HELLO”, “World”, 9, 10) );

And $data is a ~5k string containing HTML code.

My best option so far, has been $data_array = Array(); $data_array[] = $to_process; $data_array[] = $code; $data_array[] = $opt1; $data_array[] = $opt2;

We can then send urlrawencode(serialize($data_array)); from our PHP script to the web API via curl through POST data. On the remote API server, we don’t need to use urlrawdecode() as the web server handles this for you. It’s also worth ensuring that magic_quotes_gpc is off. Simply, $data_array = unserialize($_POST['variable']); should do just fine.

Tags: api, array, php programmer, php variable, post data, serialize, unserialize, urlrawencode

06 Apr 10 Communicating with the Twitter API via curl

Twitter provides an extensive API that allows developers to write interactive applications. Utilizing this API is deceptively simple, and here is an example with curl:

curl -u username:password http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/friends_timeline.xml

Which will get the statuses of all your friends. You can of course use PHP’s curl library just as easily as the command line, and my next post will focus on using php5-curl

Tags: api, curl, PHP, twitter