Question

I am trying to read Raven SEO Tools API. It is a REST API and currently it is serving the data backup as an XML (or JSON if I choose) when I just request the URL through a web browser. What is the best method to get the response from their server into my own PHP script for me to then play around with.

Any help much appreciated

Cheers

Answer 1

If you only needs to retrieve a URL and parse its info. The easiest way is curl/JSON combination. Note that parsing JSON is faster than parsing XML.

1. http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-exec.php
2. http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.json-decode.php

Something simple as:

$url = "http://api.raventools.com/api?key=B1DFC59CA6EC76FF&method=domains&format=json";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 4);
$json = curl_exec($ch);
if(!$json) {
    echo curl_error($ch);
}
curl_close($ch);
print_r(json_decode($json));

But if you need to call other methods from this API such as DELETE/PUT, etc. Then to have a REST client in PHP is more elegant solution. A comparison on those clients can be found in PHP REST Clients

I founded this code specifically for Raven API https://github.com/stephenyeargin/raventools-api-php

Sample code:

require 'path/to/raventools-api-php/raventools-api-php.class.php';
$Raven = new RavenTools( 'B1DFC59CA6EC76FF' );
$method = 'domains';
$options = array('format'=> 'json');
$responseString = $Raven->getJSON($method, $options);
print_r(json_decode($responseString));