Question

I’m working with an external API webservice that returns a json output true or false. I visit a URL like

http://site.com/api/valid

and it gives me something like this, which looks like json

"true" 

Right now I’m visiting the url manually, but I want to now do it programmatically from within my zend project. What should I use to get the result correctly

Answer 1

there are a lot of ways. The simplest is to use file_get_contents().

$result = file_get_contents("http://site.com/api/valid");
// if result is truly json
// data will be 
//    array( 0 => true)
$data = json_decode($result);

If it is a popular webservice . there might be a library written for it already. This is preferred since it will handle error conditions and corner cases. Google around for it first.