I need help avoiding duplicate code (copy pasting code twice) - php

Question

I'm trying to improve my programming skills constantly, I learned everything online so far. But I can't find a way to avoid duplicate code. Here's my code:
public function Curl($page, $check_top = 0, $pages = 1, $pagesources = array()){
//$page is the URL
//$check_top 0 = false 1 = true. When true it needs to check both false & true
//$pages is the amount of pages it needs to check.
$agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT x.y; Win64; x64; rv:10.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0";
try{
for($i = 0; $i < $pages; $i++){
$count = $i * 25; //Page 1 starts at 0, page 2 at 25 etc..
$ch = curl_init($page . "/?count=" . $count);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $agent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 60);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
$pagesource = curl_exec($ch);
$pagesources[] = $pagesource;
}
if($check_top == 1){
for($i = 0; $i < $pages; $i++){
$count = $i * 25;
$ch = curl_init($page . "/top/?sort=top&t=all&count=" . $count);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $agent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 60);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
$pagesource = curl_exec($ch);
$pagesources[] = $pagesource;
}
}
} catch (Exception $e){
echo $e->getMessage();
}
return $pagesources;
}
What I'm trying to do:
I want to get the HTML Page Sources from a specific page range (for example 1 to 5 pages). There are top pages and standard pages I want to get the sources from both with the page range. So my code works fine, but obviously; there must be a better way.

Answer 1

Here 's a short example, how you can avoid duplicate code with writing functions and using them together.
class A
{
public function methodA($paramA, $paramB, $paramC)
{
if ($paramA == 'A') {
$result = $this->methodB($paramB);
} else {
$result = $this->methodB($paramC);
}
return $result;
}
public function methodB($paramA)
{
// do something with the given param and return the result
}
}
$classA = new Class();
$result = $classA->methodA('foo', 'bar', 'baz');
The code given above shows a simple class with two methods. As you declared your function Curl in your example as public, I guess you 're using a class. The class in the example above is very basic. It calls the method methodB with different params in the nethodA method of the class.
What this means to you? You have to find out, which parameters your helper function needs. If you found out, which parameters it needs, just write another class method, which executes the curl functions with the given parameters. Simple as pie.
If you 're new into using classes and methods with php I suggest reading the documentation, where the basic functionality of classes, methods and members are described: http://php.net/manual/en/classobj.examples.php.