Question

My php project is using the reddit JSON api to grab the title of the current page’s submission.

Right now I am doing running some code every time the page is loaded and I’m running in to some problems, even though there is no real API limit.

I would like to store the title of the submission locally somehow. Can you recommend the best way to do this? The site is running on appfog. What would you recommend?

This is my current code:

<?php

/* settings */

$url="http://".$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

$reddit_url = 'http://www.reddit.com/api/info.{format}?url='.$url;

$format = 'json'; //use XML if you'd like...JSON FTW!
$title = '';

/* action */
$content = get_url(str_replace('{format}',$format,$reddit_url)); //again, can be xml or json
if($content) {
    if($format == 'json') {
        $json = json_decode($content,true);
        foreach($json['data']['children'] as $child) { // we want all children for this example
            $title= $child['data']['title'];
        }
    }
}

/* output */


/* utility function:  go get it! */
function get_url($url) {
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,1);
    $content = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    return $content;
}
?>

Thanks!

Answer 1

Introduction

Here is a modified version of your code

$url = "http://stackoverflow.com/";
$loader = new Loader();
$loader->parse($url);
printf("<h4>New List : %d</h4>", count($loader));
printf("<ul>");
foreach ( $loader as $content ) {
    printf("<li>%s</li>", $content['title']);
}
printf("</ul>");

Output

New List : 7

• New podcast from Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood.
• Good site for example code/ Pyhton
• stackoverflow.com has clearly the best Web code ever conceived in the history of the Internet and reddit should better start copying it.
• A reddit-like, OpenID using website for programmers
• Great developer site. Get your questions answered and by someone who knows.
• Stack Overflow launched into public
• Stack Overflow, a programming Q & A site. & Reddit could learn a lot from their interface!

Simple Demo

The Problem

I see some things you want to achieve here namely

• I would like to store the title of the submission locally somehow
• Right now I am doing running some code every time the page is loaded

From what i understand you need is a simple cache copy of your data so that you don’t have to load the url all the time.

Simple Solution

A simple cache system you can use is memcache ..

Example A

$url = "http://stackoverflow.com/";

// Start cache
$m = new Memcache();
$m->addserver("localhost");
$cache = $m->get(sha1($url));

if ($cache) {
    // Use cache copy
    $loader = $cache;
    printf("<h2>Cache List: %d</h2>", count($loader));
} else {

    // Start a new Loader
    $loader = new Loader();
    $loader->parse($url);
    printf("<h2>New List : %d</h2>", count($loader));
    $m->set(sha1($url), $loader);
}

// Oupput all listing
printf("<ul>");
foreach ( $loader as $content ) {
    printf("<li>%s</li>", $content['title']);
}
printf("</ul>");

Example B

You can use Last Modification Date as the cache key as so that you would only save new copy only if the document is modified

$headers = get_headers(sprintf("http://www.reddit.com/api/info.json?url=%s",$url), true);
$time = strtotime($headers['Date']); // get last modification date 
$cache = $m->get($time);

if ($cache) {
    $loader = $cache;
}

Since your class implements JsonSerializable you can json encode your result and also store in a Database like MongoDB or MySQL

 $data = json_encode($loader);
 // Save to DB 

Class Used

class Loader implements IteratorAggregate, Countable, JsonSerializable {
    private $request = "http://www.reddit.com/api/info.json?url=%s";
    private $data = array();
    private $total;

    function parse($url) {
        $content = json_decode($this->getContent(sprintf($this->request, $url)), true);
        $this->data = array_map(function ($v) {
            return $v['data'];
        }, $content['data']['children']);
        $this->total = count($this->data);
    }

    public function getIterator() {
        return new ArrayIterator($this->data);
    }

    public function count() {
        return $this->total;
    }

    public function getType() {
        return $this->type;
    }

    public function jsonSerialize() {
        return $this->data;
    }


    function getContent($url) {
        $ch = curl_init();
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 1);
        $content = curl_exec($ch);
        curl_close($ch);
        return $content;
    }
}