Question

How can I query a particular website with some fields and get the results to my webpage using php?

Let’s say website xyz.com will give you the name of the city if you give them the zipcode. How can I achieve this easliy in php? Any code snap shot will be great.

Answer 1

If I understand what you mean (You want to submit a query to a site and get the result back for processing and such?), you can use cURL.

Here is an example:

<?php      // create curl resource      $ch = curl_init();       // set url      curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'example.com');       //return the transfer as a string      curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);       // $output contains the output string      $output = curl_exec($ch);       // close curl resource to free up system resources      curl_close($ch); ?> 

You can grab the Lat/Long from this site with some regexp like this:

if ( preg_match_all( '#<td>\s+-?(\d+\.\d+)\s+</td>#', $output, $coords ) ) {     list( $lat, $long ) = $coords[1];     echo 'Latitude: $lat\nLongitude: $long\n'; } 

Just put that after the curl_close() function. That will return something like this (numbers changed):

Latitude: 53.5100 Longitude: 60.2200