Help required using PHP and Twitpic API

dmeehan

Can someone point me in the direction for help regarding my problem.
I am trying to use the twitpic.com API to write an app that will allow me to upload photos to twitpic.

So far i have created a simple form that uses the users twitter username and passwd and a browse field to get the photo file. This is the easy part and it uploads the file and the photo is then visible on twitpic.

The problem is that then this just displays an XML response.

<rsp stat="ok">
   <mediaid>31gls</mediaid>
   <mediaurl>http://twitpic.com/31gls</mediaurl>
</rsp>

how do I get PHP to grab this, parse it etc.?
EDIT: I can get the parsing bit sorted myself, just cannot grab the XML to parse it in the first place

Anyone have any good websites with help for this??

Thanks.

daymobrew

Please post the code you have or describe the algorithm you are using.

Webmonkey

Yeah a bit of code would help.

I'm guessing you created a regular HTML form and send a POST to an address and get back the xml in your browser.

Check up the cURL library in PHP, this will make posting data easy.

dmeehan

Webmonkey wrote: »

Yeah a bit of code would help.

I'm guessing you created a regular HTML form and send a POST to an address and get back the xml in your browser.

Check up the cURL library in PHP, this will make posting data easy.

all i have is as you say a regular HTML form and send a POST and get back the XML. i will have a google for cURL as I dont know what it is even.

any good websites along the lines of "cURL for dummies" ??
:-)

Placebo

using it for my clickatell script

[PHP]

$url = "$baseurl/http/auth?user=$user&password=$password&api_id=$api_id";

// do auth call

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_exec($ch);
$ret = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);


//so your XML will be stored in $ret, then i suppose you can use substring or stristri or whatever to parse it
[/PHP]

dmeehan

thanks for the replies, but it looks like I will have to uplaod the file to a temp folder on the server and then cURL it to twitpic

back to the drawing board

Bluefrog

The issue with that from a usability point of view is that you will be essentially uploading the file twice - first to your own server and then on to twitpic using Curl. Worst case scenario is that your user has to wait twice as long to learn that the file got delivered ok.

You want to cut yourself out as the middleman so the file goes directly from the user to twitpic and intercept their response. You could do this using a java applet or Flash but then you have the security issues of gaining local file access.

Another approach off the top of my head might be to host the upload form with its action set to twitpic on your own server in an iframe and hide that iframe when the upload button is clicked. You can then monitor the content of the hidden iframe to check that you get back a successful response and if not, alert the user.

dmeehan

i think i will just leave it for now - havent got the time to be digging in to cURL etc.
thanks anyways