PHP Weirdness

Beware: this post is definitely not for the feint of heart. It includes a lot of code. You have been warned.

I wrote an application some time ago for my company that looks up the longitude and latitude of an address for use in our geocoding initiative. It relied on yahoo_geo(), a function written by PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf and the Yahoo Maps API. It was largely dependent on this function:

function yahoo_geo($location) {

	$q = 'http://api.local.yahoo.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=rlerdorf&location='

		.rawurlencode($location);

	$tmp = '/tmp/yws_geo_'.md5($q);

	request_cache($q, $tmp, 43200);

	libxml_use_internal_errors(true);

	$xml = simplexml_load_file($tmp);

	$ret['precision'] = (string)$xml->Result['precision'];

	foreach($xml->Result->children() as $key=>$val) {

		if(strlen($val)) $ret[(string)$key] = (string)$val;

	}

	return $ret;

}

This function worked for over two years for us with no problems at all. Then suddenly, in the last month, it started getting spotty. I fixed things by commenting out the caching parts of the function and forcing each execution to run again. Then I got errors about the libxml_use_internal_errors() function, so I commented that out. But today, the function just flat out failed, every single time returning the same error:

Warning: file_get_contents(http://XXXXXXXXXX/XXX) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! in /home/intranet/html/fetch.php on line X

What the heck? This code is all over the web. I've tried a million permutations of this function, including using fopen() and ob_get_contents(), and none have worked. And most frustratingly, I could load the URL successfully in Lynx and eLinks, so the machine could quickly and easily fetch the URL.

So I ventured into a sandbox I've never really played before: cURL. cURL is an interesting animal. But the interesting thing is, once I got it working, it worked faster than ever! So, without further ado, here is the new and improved yahoo_geo() function:

function yahoo_geo($location) {

	$q = 'http://api.local.yahoo.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=rlerdorf&location='.urlencode(trim($location));

	$ch = curl_init($q);

	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

	ob_start();

	curl_exec($ch);

	$stream = ob_get_contents();

	ob_end_clean();

	if($stream) {

		$xml = simplexml_load_string($stream);

		$ret['precision'] = (string)$xml->Result['precision'];

		if($xml) {

			foreach($xml->Result->children() as $key=>$val) {

				if(strlen($val)) $ret[(string)$key] =  (string)$val;

			}

		}

		curl_close($ch);

		return $ret;

	} else {

		return FALSE;

	}

}

Note: If you're reproducing these functions elsewhere, be careful - WordPress may have converted the quotes into smart quotes that will need to be fixed before this script will run properly.