http requests

[a2bardeals]

ok so I don't even know how to ask this question but i'll try anyways...

 

Google has a geocoding system now and they have it setup so that you can send an HTTP request to find lat and long of an address. I want to be able to save the outputed info into PHP variables. On the documentation page from google it says this:

 

To access the Maps API geocoder directly using server-side scripting, send a request to http://maps.google.com/maps/geo? with the following parameters in the URI:

 

    * q -- The address that you want to geocode.

    * key -- Your API key.

    * output -- The format in which the output should be generated. The options are xml, kml, csv, or json.

 

 

 

how the #$@! do i send a HTTP request inside a page on my server. I want to quickly find the lat/long of a users address and calculate distance from a store.

 

If i simply type the URL in http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?key=ABCDEFG&q=200+N+MAIN+ST,+NEW+YORK,+NY&output=csv

i get a nice little text string with 4 comma seperated values two of which i want to store into variables (lat/long) then pass on to another page which will insert them into the users MySQL row.

 

Seems pretty simple uh? But how do i create the HTTP request inside my document and use the outputed info from google?

[trq]

curl.

[a2bardeals]

is cURL the only way? it seems a bit hard to do and I don't know much about compiling PHP or anything related to installing things via command line.

[trq]

Curl is included on most hosts.

[a2bardeals]

i am running my own server with whatever PHP libraries that come with standard Apache how do I know if I have cURL?

[trq]

Try running a test script with this in it to see what you have and haven't installed.

 

<?php

  phpinfo();

?>

 

ps: PHP does not come with Apache at all.

[a2bardeals]

my Apache did come with PHP

(Mac OS X includes apache as "Web Sharing" as well as PHP)

 

I have PHP Version 4.1.2 but no cURL installed

 

i tried the code:

 

<?php

$ch = curl_init("http://www.example.com/");
$fp = fopen("example_homepage.txt", "w");

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
fclose($fp);
?> 

 

and i get a call to unknown variable curl_init