GET info from external API/URL using PHP

1) Don't use file_get_contents() (If you can help it)

This is because you'd need to enable fopen_wrappers to enable file_get_contents() to work on an external source. Sometimes this is closed (depending on your host; like shared hosting), so your application will break.

Generally a good alternative is curl()

2) Using curl() to perform a GET request

This is pretty straight forward. Issue a GET request with some headers using curl().

$curl = curl_init();

curl_setopt_array($curl, array(
  CURLOPT_URL => "http://api.minetools.eu/ping/play.desnia.net/25565",
  CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
  CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 30,
  CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION => CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1,
  CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST => "GET",
  CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array(
    "cache-control: no-cache"
  ),
));

$response = curl_exec($curl);
$err = curl_error($curl);

curl_close($curl);

3) Using the response

The response comes back in a JSON object. We can use json_decode() to put this into a usable object or array.

$response = json_decode($response, true); //because of true, it's in an array
echo 'Online: '. $response['players']['online'];

Your server is returning a JSON string. So you should use json_decode() function to convert that into a plain PHP object. Thereafter you can access any variable of that object.

So, something like this shall help

<?php
$content =     file_get_contents("http://api.minetools.eu/ping/play.desnia.net/25565");

$result  = json_decode($content);

print_r( $result->players->online );
?>

More details for json_decode can be read here - http://php.net/manual/en/function.json-decode.php

Your webservice (URL: http://api.minetools.eu/ping/play.desnia.net/25565) returns JSON.

This is a standard format, and PHP (at least since 5.2) supports decoding it natively - you'll get some form of PHP structure back from it.

Your code currently doesn't work (your syntax is meaningless on the echo - and even if it was valid, you're treating a string copy of the raw JSON data as an array - which won't work), you need to have PHP interpret (decode) the JSON data first:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.json-decode.php

<?php
$statisticsJson = file_get_contents("http://api.minetools.eu/ping/play.desnia.net/25565");
$statisticsObj = json_decode($statisticsJson);

Your $statisticsObj will be NULL if an error occurred - and you can get that error using other standard PHP functions:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.json-last-error.php

Assuming it isn't NULL, you can examine the structure of the object with var_dump($statisticsObj) - and then alter your code to print it out appropriately.

In short, something like:

<?php
$statisticsJson = file_get_contents("http://api.minetools.eu/ping/play.desnia.net/25565");
$statisticsObj = json_decode($statisticsJson);
if ($statisticsObj !== null) {
   echo $statisticsObj->players->online;
} else {
   echo "Unknown";
}

You should also check what comes back from file_get_contents() too - various return values can come back (which would blow up json_decode()) on errors. See the documentation for possibilities:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.file-get-contents.php

I'd also wrap the entire thing in a function or class method to keep your code tidy. A simple "almost complete" solution could look like this:

<?php
function getServerStatistics($url) {
    $statisticsJson = file_get_contents($url);
    if ($statisticsJson === false) {
       return false;
    }

    $statisticsObj = json_decode($statisticsJson);
    if ($statisticsObj !== null) {
       return false;
    }

    return $statisticsObj;
}

// ...

$stats = getServerStatistics($url);
if ($stats !== false) {
    print $stats->players->online;
}

If you want better handling over server / HTTP errors etc, I'd look at using curl_*() - http://php.net/manual/en/book.curl.php

Ideally you also should be confirming the structure returned from your webservice is what you expected before blindly making assumptions too. You can do that with something like property_exists().

Happy hacking!

Since it's returning an array you should use print_r or var_dump instead of echo. Or perhaps it threw you an error.