Question

I’m trying to learn how to use CURL and Json to access data sent from the Facebook graph api.

I’m using the following function which pulls the post data:

 function loadFB($fbID){
      $url="https://graph.facebook.com/".$fbID."/feed?limit=1&access_token=xxxx";
      $c = curl_init($url);
      curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
      $page = json_decode(curl_exec($c));
      curl_close($c);
      $post=reset($page->data);

      if($post->message == '') {

        $post_msg = '<a href="' . $post->link . '">' . $post->name . '</a>';

      } else {

        $post_msg = $post->message;

      }

      return $post_msg;
 }

Example JSOn data looks like this:

{
"data": [
  {
     "id": "xxxx",
     "from": {
        "name": "xxx",
        "category": "xxx",
        "id": "xxx"
     },
     "picture": "xxxxxxxxx",
     "link": "xxxxxxx",
     "name": "Event name goes here",
     "properties": [

        {
           "text": "Friday, July 15, 2011 at 4:00pm"
        },
        {
           "text": "Venue Name"
        }
     ],
     "icon": "http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v1/yW/r/r28KD-9uEMh.gif",
     "type": "link",
     "object_id": "xxx",
     "created_time": "2011-06-23T06:46:17+0000",
     "updated_time": "2011-06-23T06:46:17+0000",
     "likes": {
        "data": [
           {
              "name": "xxxx",
              "category": "xxx",
              "id": "xxxx"
           }
        ],
        "count": 1
     }
  }
],
"paging": {
  "previous": "xxxxx",
  "next": "xxx"
}
 }

As it stands, I can retrieve the message of a page update, or if its an event I can retrieve the event name and the link for the event.

But what if I want to retrieve say the event date or the venue name? Its under another tier of ‘properties’.

With my code so far, I can access the first level of things with $post->message, but when I try $post->properties->text this doesn’t work – so I don’t understand how this works. On top of that, in the ‘properties’, there’s 2 ‘text’ which is adding to my confusion of how to access these things.

Any pointers?

Answer 1

$post->properties is an array so :

$post->properties[0]->text;