Question

Heres my bit o’ php, tryin to figure out why I’m not getting a $result going to the URL it produces will give me a valid JSON result based on a get or post. So I think my problem is how I am using cURL. So I need someone take on this.

        //open connection
        $ch = curl_init();
        //set the url, number of POST vars, POST data
        curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
        curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST,count($params));
        curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$fields_string);
        curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
        //execute post
        $result = curl_exec($ch);           
                    if(!$result)
                    {
                        $error = curl_error($ch); echo $error; return false;
                    }
        //close connection
        curl_close($ch);

        //return json_decode($result);
                    echo $result;

EDITED CODE ABOVE From original Post

$error does not report anything. I changed the return json… to echo to see if that was doing anything and it printed out ‘Disallowed Key Characters.‘ on the screen.

EDIT 2

$url = http://domain.com/search
$params = array('q'=>'search,term')

$params is put through a foreach loop which builds the $fields_string

$fields_string = '?';
foreach($params as $key=>$value) { $fields_string .= $key.'='.$value.'&'; }
$fields_string = substr($fields_string,0,-1);

fields_string looks like ?ll=37.2790669,-121.874722&range=10 in the end (for what I am doing currently, I have anywhere from 1-12 optional parameters that can be passed which is why I am building it the way I am.

Answer 1

Try adding error checking to make sure curl_exec is executing successfully and to get a meaningful error message back on the server.

something like:

    $ch = curl_init();
    //Make string url safe with urlencode
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,urlencode($url));
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST,count($params));
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$fields_string);
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    $result = curl_exec($ch);
    if(!$result) {
        $error = curl_error();
        //$error now contains the error thrown when curl_exec failed to execute
        //echo this to terminal or to an error box in the browser?
    }
    curl_close($ch);

    return json_decode($result);

Post your resulting error here if you still need help.
Also, here are the manual pages for the two functions I took advantage of:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-error.php

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-exec.php

http://php.net/manual/en/function.urlencode.php

-Cheers