Help echoing array from php function

Question

Alright I am still learning my functions in php but this particular piece of code has me stuck. Credit goes to http://www.barattalo.it/2010/08/29/php-bot-to-get-wikipedia-definitions/ for the wikipedia query segment. I thought this looked interesting and am trying to use the code provided to echo data from the function. This is what I have:

<?php
    function wikidefinition($s) {
        $url = "http://wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=opensearch&search=".urlencode($s)."&format=xml&limit=1";
        $ch = curl_init($url);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPGET, TRUE);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, FALSE);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, FALSE);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, FALSE);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, "");
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 4);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; he; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8");
        $page = curl_exec($ch);
        $xml = simplexml_load_string($page);
        if((string)$xml->Section->Item->Description) {
            return array((string)$xml->Section->Item->Text, (string)$xml->Section->Item->Description, (string)$xml->Section->Item->Url);
        } else {
            return "blank";
        }
    }

    $define = wikidefinition("test");
    echo $define;

?>

however this simply echos "array" I know the code is getting to the if/else statement because if you change the input in "$define = wikidefinition("test");" to some random key combination such as "qoigenqnge" it will echo "blank" I cannot figure out why it is only echoing "array" instead of the data inside the array. Probably something stupid, but I have been reading up on arrays for a while and cant find any info. Any help will be great thanks!

please format your code, it only takes a minute and makes answering your question much easier. — Chris Eberle
– Chris Eberle, Commented May 15, 2011 at 3:24

Nic · Accepted Answer · 2011-05-15 03:25:39Z

5

Have you tried:

print_r($define);

instead of echo ?

answered May 15, 2011 at 3:25

Nic

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5 Comments

sikas Over a year ago

That was exactly what I`m gonna say :)

tknickman Over a year ago

ah good call, I had previously tried print_r but had set it up wrong. That worked but I know print_r is more of a debugging command, any way to get a result that looks a little nicer than this? eg. just the definition of test?

Nic Over a year ago

@jangoforhire sounds like what you want to echo is one of the elements of the array - after you've dumped out the array, look at the keys, and try echoing that. Something like echo $define['definition'];

Nic Over a year ago

Actually, you should probably just return the definition in your function if that is all you are looking for. No need to allocate an array if you don't need to :)

tknickman Over a year ago

got it I was just looking at that now. Thanks very much for your help! Answer marked.

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