retrieve Json information from php file using cURL - php

Question

ive seen lots of examples and to be honest i am a little confused on the matter.
I have been doing php for only 3 weeks so i am very new to this.
Basically i have wrote a function that asks for a token and a url, then it checks the database to if is exists, if it exists it then will offer a json array. I was wondering how select file and enter the function and retrieve the json data using cURL.
The function i have created is within the http://www.domain.com/api.php
Here is the function code:
function check_api_website($token, $url){
$token = trim(htmlentities($token));
$safetoken = mysql_real_escape_string($token);
$url = trim(htmlentities($url));
$safeurl = mysql_real_escape_string($url);
$checkwebsite = "SELECT message,islive FROM websitetokens WHERE url='".$safeurl."' AND token='".$safetoken."'";
$checkwebsite_result = mysql_query($checkwebsite) OR die();
$numberofrows = mysql_num_rows($checkwebsite_result);
if($numberofrows > 0){
$website = mysql_fetch_array($checkwebsite_result);
$message = stripslashes($website["message"]);
$islive = stripslashes($website["islive"]);
json_encode(array(
'message' => $message,
'islive' => $islive,
));
$date = date('Y-m-d');
$time = gmdate('H:i');
$loginwebsite = "UPDATE websitetokens SET loggedin='".$date."',time='".$time."' WHERE url='".$safeurl."' AND token='".$safetoken."'";
$loginwebsite_result = mysql_query($loginwebsite) OR die();
} else {
json_encode(array(
'message' => '',
'islive' => '1',
));
}
}
As you can see the json_encode is there and that is what i am wanting to retrieve.
If you could please explain a little also would help my learning.
Thanks for the help in advance :)

Answer 1

A simple request with cUrl to retrieve and parse JSON data would look like this:
function get_json($url) {
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
$resultCode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
curl_close($ch);
if ($resultCode == 200) {
return json_decode($data);
} else {
return false;
}
}
You can place this method in your code and simply call it like this:
$json = get_json('http://www.example.com');
Good to see you're aware SQL injections and escaping the input. However, some PHP configurations might have the so called 'magic quotes' enabled, which escapes quotes on any input parameters with slashes.
If those slashes aren't stripped before calling mysql_real_escape_string, the resulting string will be double escaped. You can use a method like this to make sure everything gets escaped properly:
function escape_string($string) {
if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
$string = stripslashes($string);
}
return mysql_real_escape_string($string);
}