Slack Slash Command - Getting user icon URL with username (PHP) - php

Question

I am new at programming Slash commands in Slack. For one of my commands, I have a username and need to retrieve the user icon URL. I am using PHP to code them.
I was planning on using users.profile.get, since the tutorial here shows that one of the fields returned is the user icon URL.
However, I am trying to find examples on how to make a call to this method and have not found any. Could anybody give me a quick example of the call, including how to send the parameters?
This is how far I got:
$slack_profile_url = "https://slack.com/api/users.profile.get";
$fields = urlencode($data);
$slack_call = curl_init($slack_profile_url);
curl_setopt($slack_call, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST");
curl_setopt($slack_call, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $fields);
curl_setopt($slack_call, CURLOPT_CRLF, true);
curl_setopt($slack_call, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($slack_call, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
"Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
"Content-Length: " . strlen($fields))
);
$profile = curl_exec($slack_call);
curl_close($slack_call);
I basically have $token and $user_name and need to get the profile picture URL. How do I format $token and $username as $data? Is the call correct?
If anybody recommends doing this a different way, I would appreciate any advice as well.
Thank you so much!

Answer 1

To get data into the right format to post to Slack is pretty straight forward. There's two options (POST body or application/x-www-form-urlencoded).
The query string for application/x-www-form-urlencoded is formatted like a get URL string.
https://slack.com/api/users.profile.get?token={token}&user={user}
// Optionally you can add pretty=1 to make it more readable
https://slack.com/api/users.profile.get?token={token}&user={user}&pretty=1
Just request that URL and you will retrieve the data.
The POST body format will use a similar code to what you have above.
$loc = "https://slack.com/api/users.profile.get";
$POST['token'] = "{token}";
$POST['user'] = "{user}";
$ch = curl_init($loc);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $POST);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
if ($error = curl_errno($ch)) { echo $error; }
//close connection
curl_close($ch);
echo $result;