Question

Im working on a simple php script that will return the number of search results from google search on a specific string (using cURL). When i keep my code global everything works fine but as soon as i create a function I get an error

Notice: Undefined variable: resultTagId in C:\wamp\www\tag.php on line 24
Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in C:\wamp\tag.php on line 24

here is my code

<?php

$resultTagId = "resultStats"; 
$encodedNames = $_GET['names'];
$names=json_decode($encodedNames);


    getNumber($names[0]);

function getNumber($name) // before i used to set $name = $names[0] and everything worked fine
{
    $name = str_replace(" ", "+", trim($name));

    $url='http://www.google.com/search?q='.$name.'&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t';

    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    $data = curl_exec ($ch);
    curl_close ($ch);

    $dom = new DOMDocument();
    @$dom->loadHTML( $data );
    $resultsTag =  $dom->getElementById($resultTagId)->nodeValue;

    $results =  preg_replace("/[^0-9]/","" ,$resultsTag);
    echo $results;
}
?>

Answer 1

There are a variety of ways that you can do this (including using a global, which tends to make things messy), but the best way is to pass your variable as an argument.

Change the arguments for the function:

function getNumber($name, $tagId) {

And when you’re calling the function, pass your variable:

getNumber($names[0], $resultTagId)