How can I get and process a response from a PHP API

Question

Ok I will try and keep this short. I'm making a request to a simple PHP API which can be done by AJAX through Javascript or JQuery, however I want to make the request using PHP. What is the best way to do this? Using the file_get_contents() function or CURL? If so how do I do it through CURL as the API requires I use GET not POST. Also the response I know is in XML, how do I then process the response once it comes back?

This question may have been asked many times, however when reviewing a lot of the questions and answers they are not specific to my needs on this one so please no answers with "Please see this link" as I can guarantee it won't answer the question in full as a lot of them are making requests from either Facebook API or another API that does not do what the API I am using does.

Answer 1

function  getXML()
{

 $ch = curl_init();
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://127.0.0.1/index.html");
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "user:password");
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_ANY);
 $res = curl_exec($ch);

 return  $res;

}

    $xml_data = getXML();

    $doc = new DOMDocument();
    $doc->loadXML($xml_data);

    $wms = $doc->getElementsByTagName('WowzaMediaServer');


    $wmstotalactive = $wms->item(0)->getElementsByTagName("ConnectionsCurrent")->item(0)->nodeValue;
    $wmstotaloutbytes = $wms->item(0)->getElementsByTagName("MessagesOutBytesRate")->item(0)->nodeValue;

so you extracted from xml the value from ConnectionsCurrent key and MessagesOutBytesRate .

If your link does not need to auth remove :

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "user:password");

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_ANY);