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PHP Weirdness

Beware: this post is definitely not for the feint of heart. It includes a lot of code. You have been warned.

I wrote an application some time ago for my company that looks up the longitude and latitude of an address for use in our geocoding initiative. It relied on yahoo_geo(), a function written by PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf and the Yahoo Maps API. It was largely dependent on this function:

function yahoo_geo($location) {
	$q = 'http://api.local.yahoo.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=rlerdorf&location='
		.rawurlencode($location);
	$tmp = '/tmp/yws_geo_'.md5($q);
	request_cache($q, $tmp, 43200);
	libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
	$xml = simplexml_load_file($tmp);
	$ret['precision'] = (string)$xml->Result['precision'];
	foreach($xml->Result->children() as $key=>$val) {
		if(strlen($val)) $ret[(string)$key] = (string)$val;
	}
	return $ret;
}

This function worked for over two years for us with no problems at all. Then suddenly, in the last month, it started getting spotty. I fixed things by commenting out the caching parts of the function and forcing each execution to run again. Then I got errors about the libxml_use_internal_errors() function, so I commented that out. But today, the function just flat out failed, every single time returning the same error:

Warning: file_get_contents(http://XXXXXXXXXX/XXX) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! in /home/intranet/html/fetch.php on line X

What the heck? This code is all over the web. I’ve tried a million permutations of this function, including using fopen() and ob_get_contents(), and none have worked. And most frustratingly, I could load the URL successfully in Lynx and eLinks, so the machine could quickly and easily fetch the URL.

So I ventured into a sandbox I’ve never really played before: cURL. cURL is an interesting animal. But the interesting thing is, once I got it working, it worked faster than ever! So, without further ado, here is the new and improved yahoo_geo() function: 

function yahoo_geo($location) {
	$q = 'http://api.local.yahoo.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=rlerdorf&location='.urlencode(trim($location));
	$ch = curl_init($q);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
	ob_start();
	curl_exec($ch);
	$stream = ob_get_contents();
	ob_end_clean();
	if($stream) {
		$xml = simplexml_load_string($stream);
		$ret['precision'] = (string)$xml->Result['precision'];
		if($xml) {
			foreach($xml->Result->children() as $key=>$val) {
				if(strlen($val)) $ret[(string)$key] =  (string)$val;
			}
		}
		curl_close($ch);
		return $ret;
	} else {
		return FALSE;
	}
}

Note: If you’re reproducing these functions elsewhere, be careful – WordPress may have converted the quotes into smart quotes that will need to be fixed before this script will run properly.

Published by Adam S

4 Replies to “PHP Weirdness”

  1. You may have allow_url_fopen disabled in your php.ini or a .htaccess file. use phpinfo() to see the configuration value

  2. Good thought, but that was the first thing I verified. allow_url_fopen is and always has been on, which is why it worked in the first place.

  3. You don't need the ob_start in the curl example.

    You can use:

    function read_whatever ($ch, $str) {
    }

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION, 'read_body');

    (it was copied from a multi-curl-example, but it should work)

    Lennie

  4. You don't need the ob_start in the curl example.

    You can use:

    function read_whatever ($ch, $str) {
    }

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION, 'read_body');

    (it was copied from a multi-curl-example, but it should work)

    Lennie

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