Question

I’m trying to set up a script that will scrape my facebook pages and return to me all the info so I will be able to insert it to the database (Name, Likes etc..). I built a CURL script but its not working for some weird reason. It throws me “Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in C:\xampp\XXX\curltest.php on line 26”.

Yes JSON and CURL are enabled on my server. I will be glad if someone will help. 😉

    <?php
// create both cURL resources
$ch1 = curl_init();
$ch2 = curl_init();

// set URL and other appropriate options
curl_setopt($ch1, CURLOPT_URL, "http://graph.facebook.com/19292868552");
curl_setopt($ch1, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch1, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_URL, "http://graph.facebook.com/youtube");
curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

//create the multiple cURL handle
$mh = curl_multi_init();

//add the two handles
curl_multi_add_handle($mh,$ch1);
curl_multi_add_handle($mh,$ch2);

$running=null;
//execute the handles
do {
    usleep(10000);
    $Likes = json_decode(curl_multi_exec($mh,$running));
    return $Likes->data;

          //output the message body
          echo($Likes->likes);
          //add a line break to separate comments
          echo("<br />");   

} while ($running > 0);



//close the handles
curl_multi_remove_handle($mh, $ch1);
curl_multi_remove_handle($mh, $ch2);
curl_multi_close($mh);


?>

Also I would like to know how to to make some kind of “while” function. If, let’s say, I would like to scrape 10 URLs I can’t write them one-by-one so I would be better off making an SQL query to pull those URLs from there.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Basically, there is nothing in your $Likes variable. You should test to make sure your exec and decode succeeded.

The reason there is nothing in that variable is because json_decode() failed. The reason that json_decode() failed is that the output of the curl_multi_exec() function is a handle to a cURL process. If you read the documentation, you will see that.

You need to use curl_multi_getcontent() to get the data returned.