How to call a website service from PHP?

Question

My problem is the following, I have an EmailReports.php on my server which I use to send mails like EmailReports.php?who=some@gmail.com&what=123456.pdf

I can NOT

Answer 1

You could use a Curl request to retrieve information (xml/html/json/etc) from any website.

What is CURL? (short answer)

PHP has a very powerful library of calls that are specifically designed to safely fetch data from remote sites. It's called CURL.

Source : PHP, CURL, and YOU!

Example of Curl function in PHP

/* gets the data from a URL */
function get_data($url)
{
 if(function_exists('curl_init')){
 $ch = curl_init();
 $timeout = 5;
 curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
 curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
 curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,$timeout);
 $data = curl_exec($ch);
 curl_close($ch);
 return $data;
 } else 'curl is not available, please install';
 }

Source : Download a URL’s Content Using PHP cURL

Alternatively, you could do what you are currently doing with file_get_contents but many hosts don't allow this. (Walsh, 2007)

Usage

';
print_r($mydata); //display the contents in $mydata as preformatted text
echo '

'; ?>

Try to test it, with other websites because more often than not google will return a 404 request (this is to be expected), after a curl has been executed.