How to print an array element from JSON into PHP

Question

If you access the webpage https://api.mercadolibre.com/items/MLB752465575 you will receive a JSON response. All I need to start is print the item "id" on the screen.

This is my code:

<html>
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <title>Untitled Document</title>
  </head>
  <body>
  <?php

    $json_str = "https://api.mercadolibre.com/items/MLB752465575";

    $obj = json_decode($json_str);

    echo "id: $obj->id<br>"; 

  ?>
  </body>
</html>

All I want is receive the MLB752465575 part into my browser.

How can I do it?

Patrick Simard · Accepted Answer · 2017-07-22 23:08:02Z

3

$json_str = "https://api.mercadolibre.com/items/MLB752465575";

The above does not retrieve the data it's saving the url to the var and that's not what you want.

You just need to fetch the content You can use cURL or file_get_contents()

cURL version:

<?php

$url = "https://api.mercadolibre.com/items/MLB752465575";
$curl = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
$r = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
$array = json_decode($r, true);

echo "<pre>";
print_r($array);
echo "</pre>";

?>

file_get_contents version:

<?php
$r = file_get_contents('https://api.mercadolibre.com/items/MLB752465575');

echo "<pre>";
echo print_r(json_decode($r, true));
echo "</pre>";
?>

Both of them will work unless the remote website requires you to be human (has extra verifications to stop robot requests). cURL would be a better way if that were the case because you can fake a user agent using a header array.

Once you have the array build it's just a matter of accessing the required data. using $r as an array result of the remote json structure.

edited Jul 22, 2017 at 23:08

answered Jul 22, 2017 at 22:53

Patrick Simard

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4 Comments

Steve Chamaillard Over a year ago

Not true, the URL actually links to the raw JSON when using PHP, tried myself within a PHP script.

Patrick Simard Over a year ago

Your right it works when used in the code. just tested it. Weird that if you open the website it's all formatted. Interesting concept hehe

Steve Chamaillard Over a year ago

They're simply showing HTML when specifically requested in the headers, which is what our browsers do, otherwise they send raw JSON :)

Patrick Simard Over a year ago

Yeah that's what I figured but I still find it interesting hehe I might use that my self on one of my projects lol

Scott C Wilson · Accepted Answer · 2017-07-22 23:03:31Z

1

Use curl to get the result, and json_decode to turn it into an array.

<?php
$url = "https://api.mercadolibre.com/items/MLB752465575";
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
$httpcode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
if ($httpcode != 200) {
      echo "error " . $httpcode;
      curl_close($ch);
      return -1;
}
$result_arr = json_decode($result, true);
echo $result_arr['id'];
curl_close($ch);

answered Jul 22, 2017 at 23:03

Scott C Wilson

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Comments

Steve Chamaillard · Accepted Answer · 2017-07-22 22:57:15Z

0

$jsonResponse = file_get_contents('https://api.mercadolibre.com/items/MLB752465575');
$obj = json_decode($jsonResponse);

echo "id: {$obj->id}<br>";

What you did in your code was to json_decode the URL itself. You needed to get the content from the URL, and then decode the content.

answered Jul 22, 2017 at 22:57

Steve Chamaillard

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