I would like to know how is it possible to retrieve a string from an external page.
For example: In a PHP website, the user sends a facebook id, ex: 1157251270
And the website returns the name from http://graph.facebook.com/1157251270.
I hope I made it clear.
Thank you
The Graph API returns JSON strings, so you can use:
echo json_decode(file_get_contents('http://graph.facebook.com/1157251270'))->name; or more verbose:
$pageContent = file_get_contents('http://graph.facebook.com/1157251270'); $parsedJson = json_decode($pageContent); echo $parsedJson->name; // Romanos Fessas you get it by:
$link = json_decode(file_get_contents('http://graph.facebook.com/1157251270')); echo $link->name; Nice tut: http://webhole.net/2009/08/31/how-to-read-json-data-with-php/
Either you use :
$res_json = file_gets_contents("http://graph.facebook.com/1157251270") $res = json_decode($res_json) Or, if you prefer curl (here with https and access token) :
$ch4 = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch4, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1); curl_setopt($ch4, CURLOPT_URL, "https://graph.facebook.com/1157251270?access_token=YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN"); curl_setopt($ch4, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false); if(!$result = curl_exec($ch4)) { echo curl_error($ch4); } else { $res = json_decode($res_json) } curl_close($ch4); 
For facebook data you can use json_decode.
For another sites try with webscraping, for example: here
