using cURL to retrieve JSON data for use with jQuery - php

Question

I've been reading this helpful post:
http://techslides.com/hacking-the-google-trends-api
It shows how you can use cURL in command line/terminal to request data from google trends, for example;
curl --data "ajax=1&cid=actors&geo=US&date=201310" http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts/trendingchart
Gives you a big block of what I think is JSON. Below is an example of what I am doing to use cURL within my PHP to get data like this- however I cannot find anything that would get the data from the above cURL command to work in PHP like below.
<?php
//initialize session
$url = "http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/atom/feed?pn=p1";
$ch = curl_init();
//set options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
//execute session
$data = curl_exec($ch);
echo $data;
//close session
curl_close($ch);
?>
How do I go about getting the data from above?

Answer 1

You can do the same with the PHP cURL extension. You just need to set the options through curl_setopt, so you would do something like this
$url = "http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts/trendingchart";
$fields = "ajax=1&cid=actors&geo=US&date=201310";
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $fields);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
Now you have the response of the website in $data and you can do whatever you want with it.
You can find the PHP cURL documentation on http://php.net/curl

Answer 2

Try this
// Complete url with paramters
$url = "http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts/trendingchart?ajax=1&cid=actors&geo=US&date=201310";
// Init session
$ch = curl_init();
// Set options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
// Set option to return the result instead of echoing it
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
// Execute session
$data = curl_exec($ch);
// Close session
curl_close($ch);
// Dump json decoded result
var_dump(json_decode($data, true));