Question

I made a script which iterates through a couple pages of a third party website looking for data, I need to run it on a crontable once a day. The way I currently wrote, testing its function on a browser, the script reloads itself with javascript to go to the next page if the data it seeks isn’t found. So this won’t work in cron. The problem with simply looping through the function is that I can’t run this function multiple times: http_get() as defined by

function http_get($target, $ref)
    {
    return http($target, $ref, $method="GET", $data_array="", EXCL_HEAD);
    }

function http($target, $ref, $method, $data_array, $incl_head)
    {
    # Initialize PHP/CURL handle
    $ch = curl_init();

    # Prcess data, if presented
    if(is_array($data_array))
        {
        # Convert data array into a query string (ie animal=dog&sport=baseball)
        foreach ($data_array as $key => $value) 
            {
            if(strlen(trim($value))>0)
                $temp_string[] = $key . "=" . urlencode($value);
            else
                $temp_string[] = $key;
            }
        $query_string = join('&', $temp_string);
        }

    # HEAD method configuration
    if($method == HEAD)
        {
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, TRUE);                // No http head
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, TRUE);                // Return body
        }
    else
        {
        # GET method configuration
        if($method == GET)
            {
            if(isset($query_string))
                $target = $target . "?" . $query_string;
            curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPGET, TRUE); 
            curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POST, FALSE); 
            }
        # POST method configuration
        if($method == POST)
            {
            if(isset($query_string))
                curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $query_string);
            curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POST, TRUE); 
            curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPGET, FALSE); 
            }
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, $incl_head);   // Include head as needed
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, FALSE);        // Return body
        }

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, COOKIE_FILE);   // Cookie management.
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, COOKIE_FILE);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, CURL_TIMEOUT);    // Timeout
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, WEBBOT_NAME);   // Webbot name
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $target);             // Target site
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $ref);            // Referer value
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, FALSE);           // Minimize logs
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);    // No certificate
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);     // Follow redirects
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 4);             // Limit redirections to four
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);     // Return in string

    $return_array['FILE']   = curl_exec($ch); 
    # Create return array
    $return_array['STATUS'] = curl_getinfo($ch);
    $return_array['ERROR']  = curl_error($ch);

    # Close PHP/CURL handle
    curl_close($ch);

    # Return results
    return $return_array;
    }

Any ways I can get around this? Thanks

Answer 1

I’m not sure what your issue is – you could just have the loop contain the code that calls the functions, not the functions themselves.

Alternatively, use function_exists to test if you’ve already defined the functions.