Plug in PHP 100 POWER SOLUTIONS- P59 potx

But because the quality of Yahoo!’s results is, in my opinion, equal to Google’s, I thought I would root for the underdog and provide a plug-in for Yahoo!’s search API, particularly cons

Search Yahoo!

Both Yahoo! and Google provide excellent search results, and Microsoft’s Bing search isn’t bad either But because the quality of Yahoo!’s results is, in my opinion, equal to Google’s,

I thought I would root for the underdog and provide a plug-in for Yahoo!’s search API, particularly considering that their API allows unlimited uses per day (although they reserve the right to limit this and/or charge in the future), plus you are permitted to reorder and blend the results with other content

Obviously, with the merger of certain Bing and Yahoo! search assets, the results at Yahoo! seem likely to improve even further, since Microsoft is very keen to catch up on Google’s search engine lead It also means this plug-in may require updating if the API is

changed So, for the latest details please see http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss.

Anyway, using this plug-in you can provide three arguments to have up to 50 results returned at a time, and can page through the remaining results as deeply as you like

Figure 10-9 shows it being used to find web sites relating to the query yahoo search api.

About the Plug-in

This plug-in takes a search term and returns results from the Yahoo! search engine Upon success, it returns a two-element array with the first value being the number of results returned, and the second an array of result details, containing a sub-array in each element, with the following values:

• The title

• The abstract

• The URL to be displayed

• The URL for clicking through to

F IGURE 10-9 Use this plug-in to add Yahoo! search results to your web site.

On failure it returns a single-element array with the value FALSE It requires these arguments:

• $search A search string

• $start The first result to return

• $count The maximum number of results to return

Variables, Arrays, and Functions

$id String containing a Yahoo! Search API key

$url String containing the API URL with $id and $search appended

$xml String containing the contents of $url

$sxml SimpleXML object created from $xml

$data Array containing the results returned

$result SimpleXML object extracted from $sxml->resultset_web->result

$t String containing the current title

$a String containing the current abstract

$d String containing the current display URL

$c String containing the current click-through URL

How It Works

Because the search query in $search will be passed to the API as part of a URL, it is first encoded using the rawurlencode() function Then $search, along with a valid Yahoo!

Search API key, in $id, is incorporated with the API URL to create the string $url, which is then passed to the file_get_contents() function to retrieve the results into the variable

$xml

The string $id must contain your own unique Yahoo! Search API key; you cannot use

the key YahooDemo as you can with some other of the company’s APIs If you already have such a key, you can locate it by visiting http://developer.yahoo.com/wsregapp/?view and copying

the Search API key into your program If you don’t, you can get one free by visiting

http://developer.yahoo.com/wsregapp Check the box that says Browser Based Authentication, fill

in your details, select the Boss Search Service checkbox, and click the Continue button.

Once these details have been sent to the API it will return its result in $xml If it contains the empty string or the value FALSE, then FALSE is returned An @ symbol is also placed in front of the file_get_contents() call to suppress any error messages

A bit of work then needs to be done to transform the contents of $xml because the function that will be used to process the XML data, simplexml_load_string(), doesn’t seem to like the CDATA that Yahoo! sometimes returns In XML, a CDATA section is a piece

of content that is marked for the parser to interpret as only character data, not markup So the next few lines of code remove the <![CDATA[ and ]]> tags, leaving behind just the contents

The contents are then made XML-safe by saving all examples of &amp; by converting them to the string [ampersand], and then changing any & symbols that remain into &amp;

entities The [ampersand] strings are then changed back to &amp; entities After that, all

<b>, </b>, and <wbr> tags (the only ones Yahoo! Search seems to employ) are changed into their HTML entity equivalents

At this point, the XML data should be in a format acceptable to SimpleXML, so the contents of $xml are then processed into a SimpleXML object and placed in the object

$sxml, and the array that will be used to store all the result details, $data, is also initialized Now, to retrieve all the results, a foreach loop is used to iterate through

$sxml->resultset_web->result, placing each element into the object $result From here the title, abstract, display URL, and click-through URL are retrieved into the variables $t, $a,

$d, and $c If $a, the abstract, has a value, then these four variables are grouped into an array and inserted into the next available element of $data This check is made because sometimes Yahoo! Search results don’t have an abstract, and I choose to ignore such results Once $data has been populated, a two-element array is returned, with the first element being the number of results returned, and the second an array, each element of which is a sub-array containing the parts of each result

How to Use It

As long as you have assigned a valid Yahoo! Search key to $id in the plug-in, you can call it

by passing a query string, the number of the first result to return, and the maximum number of results to return, like this:

$search = "yahoo search api";

$results = PIPHP_SearchYahoo($search, 1, 10);

if (!$results[0]) echo "No matching results found for $search.";

In this case, the first result requested is 1, and up to ten results are wanted If $results[0]

is FALSE or has the value 0, then no results were retrieved Otherwise, the first result is accessible

in the following way:

$title = $results[1][0][0];

$abstract = $results[1][0][1];

$dispurl = $results[1][0][2];

$clickurl = $results[1][0][3];

And the second result, like this (and so on):

$title = $results[1][1][0];

$abstract = $results[1][1][1];

$dispurl = $results[1][1][2];

$clickurl = $results[1][1][3];

The best way to process these results, though, is with a foreach loop, placing each array of results temporarily in a new array such as $result, and then accessing them from there, like this:

foreach($results[1] as $result) echo "<a href='$result[3]'>$result[0]<a/><br />"

"$result[1]<br />" "<font color='green'>$result[2]</font><br /><br />";

Yahoo! requires that you observe their terms and only ever offer the click-through URL

to your users so that their click tracking will be applied Make sure you don’t use the Display URL in an <a href='…'> tag

If you wish to allow your users to page through the results, you can change the value of the start argument and re-call the plug-in

The Plug-in

function PIPHP_SearchYahoo($search, $start, $count) {

$search = rawurlencode($search);

$id = 'YourAPIKeyMustGoInThisStringOrItMayFail';

$url = 'http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/web/v1/' "$search?appid=$id&format=xml&start=$start" "&count=$count";

$xml = @file_get_contents($url);

if (!$xml) return array(FALSE);

$xml = str_replace('<![CDATA[', '', $xml);

$xml = str_replace(']]>', '', $xml);

$xml = str_replace('&amp;', '[ampersand]', $xml);

$xml = str_replace('&', '&amp;', $xml);

$xml = str_replace('[ampersand]', '&amp;', $xml);

$xml = str_replace('<b>', '&lt;b&gt;', $xml);

$xml = str_replace('</b>', '&lt;/b&gt;', $xml);

$xml = str_replace('<wbr>', '&lt;wbr&gt;', $xml);

$sxml = simplexml_load_string($xml);

$data = array();

foreach($sxml->resultset_web->result as $result) {

$t = html_entity_decode($result->title);

$a = html_entity_decode($result->abstract);

$d = html_entity_decode($result->dispurl);

$c = $result->clickurl;

if (strlen($a)) $data[] = array($t, $a, $d, $c);

}

return array(count($data), $data);

}

Get Yahoo! Stock News

If you offer any finance-related services, you can add some great content to your site by using this plug-in to retrieve stock information from the Yahoo! Finance web site With

it you can fetch the latest chart for a ticker symbol, along with all the latest news about

7 7

that stock Figure 10-10 shows it being used to display information for Apple Computer, Ticker Symbol: AAPL

About the Plug-in

This plug-in takes a stock ticker such as AAPL or MSFT, and returns news and information about the stock Upon success, it returns a three-element array, the first of which is the number of news items returned; the second is a sub-array of two URLs, the first of which is

a small and the second a large intraday chart for the stock; while the third element is a sub-array containing the following report details:

• Title

• Publishing site

• Date

• Story summary/description

• URL to the original story

On failure, a single-element array with the value FALSE is returned The plug-in requires this argument:

• $stock A valid stock ticker symbol such as YHOO or JPM

F IGURE 10-10 Add the latest stock news and charts to your web site with this plug-in.