Question

I’ve written a PHP function to get plus ones count for a URL

function makeApiCall($destinationUrl, $stringOfParams){
  $curl = curl_init();
  echo $destinationUrl.$stringOfParams."<br>";
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $destinationUrl.$stringOfParams);
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
  $result = curl_exec($curl);
  curl_close($curl);
  echo $result;
 }

While inputting https://plusone.google.com/u/0/_/+1/fastbutton as destination URL and inputting the correct string of params, the result I’m receiving in $result is HTML.
The problem is that I would like using PHP to get the count and not using JavaScript.

How can I do that?

Answer 1

Using preg_match, you can achieve it.

Assuming you are calling a url like that :

https://plusone.google.com/_/+1/fastbutton?bsv=pr&url=http://www.google.com

You are looking for:

<div id="aggregateCount" class="t1">118k</div>

or

<div id="aggregateCount" class="t1">12</div>

So you can perform:

preg_match('/\<div id=\"aggregateCount\" class=\"t1\"\>\>?([0-9]*k?)\<\/div\>/i', $result, $matches);

And $matches will be:

Array
(
    [0] => <div id="aggregateCount" class="t1">118k</div>
    [1] => 118k
)

edit:

After running the example, it seems that Google return a different number when using curl, for example, on http://www.google.com, it returns:

<div id="aggregateCount" class="t1">>9999</div>

So I’ve updated the regex to handle the >.