Google + button counts showing "0" using the Sharrre library ( Json , Php ) - php

Question

So checked via a phpinfo() and Safe Mode on my server is off, Curl is activated and there are no reasons for it not to work.
I also made sure Sharrre.php is in my root directory. Even included the Curlurl to the php file. Tried both absolute and relative linking. The google button with the counter shows as soon it is uploaded but not as expected because the counter shows 0 the entire time.
The culprit seems to be: $json = array('url'=>'','count'=>0);
After a few lines of other code we got this:
if(filter_var($_GET['url'], FILTER_VALIDATE_URL)){
if($type == 'googlePlus'){ //source http://www.helmutgranda.com/2011/11/01/get-a-url-google-count-via-php/
$contents = parse('https://clients6.google.com/rpc?key=AIzaSyCKSbrvQasunBoV16zDH9R33D88CeLr9gQurl=' . $url . '&count=true');
preg_match( '/window\.__SSR = {c: ([\d]+)/', $contents, $matches );
if(isset($matches[0])){
$json['count'] = (int)str_replace('window.__SSR = {c: ', '', $matches[0]);
}
}
So either the google url code is not valid anymore or... well maybe there is something wrong with the suspected culprit because:
when changed to a value higher than 0 $json = array('url'=>'','count'=>15);
It shows 15 counts as you can see. I want it to be dynamic though and get the counts I already have and update those per click.
What can be done to solve this?

Answer 1

In my particular case the problem was in the asignement of the URL to the Curl object.
The original script sharrre.php sets the URL by asigning it to an array element of the curl object, but this is not working and causes Google counter not retrieve any amount.
Instead, the URL must be asigned by the curl_setopt() function.
This resolved this problem in my case:
sharrre.php:
//...
$ch = curl_init();
//$options[CURLOPT_URL] = $encUrl; // <<<--- not working! comment this line.
curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $encUrl ); // <<<--- Yeeaa, working! Add this line.
//...
Hope this help.