» API Usage FTW SoupyC’s Blog: An outlet for a gamerscore addiction

Published in May 21st, 2008

Ok, so I’m no PHP expert, XML wizard or API samurai…but it’s no secret that I’ve been trying to play with various API’s in my spare time. Whether it be the API of 360voice, flickr (I have a flickr by the way!) or Twitter, I’ve been trying to expand my knowledge with these recently. My first ’show’ of success was when I was able to show the stats of my recently ended gaming race ‘LIVE’, using the 360voice API. This was fine, but not very impressive. Today, (I think) I’ve outdone that!

Presenting…

TA DA!!!
Can take a while to load when Twitter is down…anybody know how to check a timeout of cURL in PHP??

OK, so it’s not overly impressive…and all it shows is something that I could get from Twitter themselves (in a much better designed way!) but the point is I created it, myself, from scratch! It means a lot more when it’s done that way!

All this means is that I am progressing with my API usage and hopefully, in the not to distant future, I will have a whole host of tools making use of various APIs. One day…maybe!

SoupyC

4 users responded in " API Usage FTW "

mitharus said, in May 29th, 2008 at 10:35 am

Can take a while to load when Twitter is down…anybody know how to check a timeout of cURL in PHP??

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Well, if you’re meaning you’re using something like curl_init(), etc… then you’ll want to use curl_setopt() and set the timeout value to something like (15 sec timeout):

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 15);

See the page:

http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-setopt.php

SoupyC said, in May 29th, 2008 at 12:11 pm

@mitharus: Funny, I found that a couple days after posting this but it didn’t seem to work. I set it to 6 seconds and my image took about 10 seconds to load, but it did have the correct Twitter text. I’m happy to share my code in case there’s something wrong! Is there any way to test that function out? Also, I would like it to return something like “Twitter not responding” in that case…is that doable too? In other words, how do I handle if it does time out?

Thank you so much for responding though. It, at least, lets me know that it works for some people, lol!

mitharus said, in May 29th, 2008 at 7:19 pm

Well, I personally have never used the curl family of functions so I can’t help there… sorry. I normally open a URL as a standard file not caring about checking latency… yeah, I suck.

If the function runs as a normal ‘timeout’ (I’m thinking TCP/IP timeout here), than if there’s *any* data transfer what so ever, the timeout is never reached. The timeout is for non-responsiveness, not slowdown.

My guess is that for something running slow, you’d have to load the image in a loop and have a timer catch (check time see how long has passed), and if X sec passes, kill the other call; break out of the loop, and set your own image with your own text.

I’m sure there’s a way to do the above… I’ll just have to look into it a bit and let you know what I find. Also, if you have access to my e-mail address and want to send me the block of code that’s causing a problem it’s your call.

It may be necessary to use curl_multi_getcontent() or similar to have a way to check “easily”.

SoupyC said, in May 29th, 2008 at 7:42 pm

@mitharus: I like your idea of checking the timeout myself…I think I could string something like that together without a problem!

I’ll do up a few test scenarios and see what I can come up with. Also going to look into that curl_multi_getcontent()…never heard of it but I’ll see if it can help.

If I get stuck, I’ll e-mail the code, but I’ll try the timeout method and see what I get.

Thanks for all your help!