PHP get results from URL - php

Question

stupid question I think.
I have an API that i want to access. if I simply put the url in my browser it returns all the results correctly.
https://api.mydomain.com/v1/name?user=user1&pass=1234
in my browser this returns array information:
{"firstname":"John","Surname":"Smith"}
I want to be able to use PHP to simply assign the results of the URL page to a variable:
$url="https://api.mydomain.com/v1/name?user=user1&pass=1234";
$result=parse($url);
print_r($result);
This obviously doesnt work but just looking for the correct syntax. done some research but not getting any luck. should be so simple but is not.
advice appreciated as always.
Thanks

Answer 1

Just make a request to your API service:
$url="https://api.mydomain.com/v1/name?user=user1&pass=1234";
$result = file_get_contents($url);
Then, if I understand correctly, your API returns JSON response, so you have to decode it:
$vars = json_decode($result, true);
Which will return an array with all the variables:
echo $vars['firstname']; //"John";
echo $vars['Surname']; //"Smith";

Answer 2

solution: file_get_contents (or maybe you'll need curl if ini_get("allow_url_fopen") !=1 ....)
$url="https://api.mydomain.com/v1/name?user=user1&pass=1234";
$result=parse(file_get_contents($url));
print_r($result);
hope your "parse()" function knows how to parse the result from your api call. i guess you don't know what you're doing, and next you'll be asking why the parse function is not defined :p (it looks like you're looking for json_decode , just a guess.)
i think your parse function would look like:
function parse($apiresponse){return json_decode($apiresponse,true);}

Answer 3

If you have the CURL library installed, you could do this:
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://api.mydomain.com/v1/name?user=user1&pass=1234');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
$vars = json_decode($result, true);
//do something useful with the $vars variable

Answer 4

Cannot you do some search?
Take a look at Google with keywords "PHP get results from URL"