Search external website

[liamloveslearning]

Hi all,

Im just wondering how you go about building a search function to another website, So on my webpage i could have a search that searchs the itunes store or something?

 

Has anybody previous experience with this or can point me in the right direction, I have googled this but all im being shown is an overwhelming amount of results for google instant! thanks in advance

[mraza]

You can do that with using cURL or file_get_contents()

 

first you need to do query on site and then fetch results and with some regex display that to your end user. for example if itunes search query is here

 

itunes.com/search.php?query=search+something

 

then you need to  point in your curl session to that url so a simple query should look like this

$string = " search something";
$url = "itunes.com/search.php?query=" . $string; 
$ch = curl_init(); 
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); 
$result = curl_exec($ch); 
curl_close($ch); 

// rather then echo you need to parse returned page and display results
echo $result;

 

 

 

[fortnox007]

Nice, thx for the clear explanation

[liamloveslearning]

Ahh, Brilliant thanks mraza Ill have a good look into the functions