Simple API Usage with PHP

APIs allow web applications to fetch and send data to external services. I will demonstrate how to retrieve and send data using PHP.

1. Fetching Data from an API using cURL

cURL is a powerful tool for making API requests in PHP. To fetch JSON data from an API, use the following code:

$url = "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1";
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

$data = json_decode($response, true);
print_r($data);

2. Using file_get_contents() for API Calls

Alternatively, you can use file_get_contents() to fetch data:

$url = "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1";
$response = file_get_contents($url);
$data = json_decode($response, true);
print_r($data);

3. Sending Data to an API (POST Request)

To send data to an API using cURL, use the following code:

$url = "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts";
$data = ["title" => "PHP API Usage", "body" => "This is a test message", "userId" => 1];

$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, ['Content-Type: application/json']);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, json_encode($data));

$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

print_r(json_decode($response, true));