CURL won't get the data from this website - php

Question

I'm trying to retrieve data from www.dotabuff.com for a list of steam ID, but I only get in return "We couldn't find what you are looking for!".
The goal is to go to the website, search a player with his steam ID and extract his win rate.
(This is intended for very small lists, which will not bother dotabuff).
Here is my code (example with a static steam ID):
//create array of data to be posted
$post_data['utf8'] = '✓';
$post_data['q'] = '76561198055615656';
$post_data['commit'] = 'Search';
//traverse array and prepare data for posting (key1=value1)
foreach ( $post_data as $key => $value) {
$post_items[] = $key . '=' . $value;
}
//create the final string to be posted using implode()
$post_string = implode ('&', $post_items);
//create cURL connection
$curl_connection =
curl_init('https://www.dotabuff.com//');
//set options
curl_setopt($curl_connection, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 30);
curl_setopt($curl_connection, CURLOPT_USERAGENT,
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)");
curl_setopt($curl_connection, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl_connection, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($curl_connection, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
//set data to be posted
curl_setopt($curl_connection, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post_string);
//perform our request
$result = curl_exec($curl_connection);
echo $result;
//close the connection
curl_close($curl_connection);

Answer 1

You are using POST with curl to do the search, but looking at the Dotabuff website the search form is using GET, so I suspect the website is looking for GET vars instead of POST vars. I haven't tested this but I would suggest doing a curl request to https://www.dotabuff.com/search?q=76561198055615656 (without the POSTFIELDS) and see what that gives you.

Answer 2

Init curl without the URL, or assemble a GET version of the URL and post it to the site.
For example, if you want info on user 'USH!' (I reandomly selected one). the URL you'd synthesize would look like this:
https://www.dotabuff.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=USH%21&button=
I's suggest using urlencode to convert the player ID to a GET URI safe string
ex:
$safe_player_id = urlencode($player_id)
$URI = sprintf("https://www.dotabuff.com/search?q=%s&button=",$safe_player_id);
Or, if you know their player ID code (int) then this would work to get the page of stats (this works):
https://www.dotabuff.com/players/76561198055615656
Then you just need to parse the page for what you want.