Consume WebService with php - php

Question

Can anyone give me an example of how I can consume the following web service with php?
http://www.webservicex.net/uszip.asmx?op=GetInfoByZIP

Answer 1

Here's a simple example which uses curl and the GET interface.
$zip = 97219;
$url = "http://www.webservicex.net/uszip.asmx/GetInfoByZIP?USZip=$zip";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$xmlobj = simplexml_load_string($result);
The $result variable contains XML which looks like this
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<NewDataSet>
<Table>
<CITY>Portland</CITY>
<STATE>OR</STATE>
<ZIP>97219</ZIP>
<AREA_CODE>503</AREA_CODE>
<TIME_ZONE>P</TIME_ZONE>
</Table>
</NewDataSet>
Once the XML is parsed into a SimpleXML object, you can get at the various nodes like this:
print $xmlobj->Table->CITY;
If you want to get fancy, you could throw the whole thing into a class:
class GetInfoByZIP {
public $zip;
public $xmlobj;
public function __construct($zip='') {
if($zip) {
$this->zip = $zip;
$this->load();
}
}
public function load() {
if($this->zip) {
$url = "http://www.webservicex.net/uszip.asmx/GetInfoByZIP?USZip={$this->zip}";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$this->xmlobj = simplexml_load_string($result);
}
}
public function __get($name) {
return $this->xmlobj->Table->$name;
}
}
which can then be used like this:
$zipInfo = new GetInfoByZIP(97219);
print $zipInfo->CITY;

Answer 2

I would use the HTTP POST or GET interfaces with curl. It looks like it gives you a nice clean XML output that you could parse with simpleXML.
Something like the following would go along way (warning, totally untested here):
$ch = curl_init('http://www.webservicex.net/uszip.asmx/GetInfoByZIP?USZip=string');
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,TRUE);
$xml = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$parsed = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
print_r($parsed);