Can I Send URL with Parameters via PHP and retrieve the data? - php

Question

I'm starting to help a friend who runs a website with small bits of coding work, and all the code required will be PHP. I am a C# developer, so this will be a new direction.
My first stand-alone task is as follows:
The website is informed of a new species of fish. The scientific name is entered into, say, two input controls, one for the genus (X) and another for the species (Y). These names will need to be sent to a website in the format:
http://www.fishbase.org/Summary/speciesSummary.php?genusname=X&speciesname=Y&lang=English
Once on the resulting page, there are further links for common names and synonyms.
What I would like to be able to do is to find these links, and call the URL (as this will contain all the necessary parameters to get the particular data) and store some of it.
I want to save data from both calls and, once completed, convert it all into xml which can then be uploaded to the website's database.
All I'd like to know is (a) can this be done, and (b) how difficult is it?
Thanks in advance
Martin

Answer 1

If I understand you correctly you want your script to download a page and process the downloaded data. If so, the answers are:
a) yes
b) not difficult
:)
Oke... here some more information: I would use the CURL extension, see:
http://php.net/manual/en/book.curl.php
<?php
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "example.com");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
?>

Answer 2

I used a thing called snoopy (http://sourceforge.net/projects/snoopy/) 4 years a go.
I took about 500 customers profiles from a website that published them in a few hours.

Answer 3

a) Yes
b) Not difficult when have experience.
Google for CURL first, or allow_url_fopen.

Answer 4

file_get_contents() will do the job:
$data = file_get_contents('http://www.fishbase.org/Summary/speciesSummary.php?genusname=X&speciesname=Y&lang=English');

Answer 5

// Отправить URL-адрес
function send_url($url, $type = false, $debug = false) { // $type = 'json' or 'xml'
$result = '';
if (function_exists('curl_init')) {
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
} else {
if (($content = #file_get_contents($url)) !== false) $result = $content;
}
if ($type == 'json') {
$result = json_decode($result, true);
} elseif ($type == 'xml') {
if (($xml = #simplexml_load_file($result)) !== false) $result = $xml;
}
if ($debug) echo '<pre>' . print_r($result, true) . '</pre>';
return $result;
}
$data = send_url('http://ip-api.com/json/212.76.17.140', 'json', true);