Category: Software

It’s been a while since I last updated my Curl HTTP Client class. That’s the class that we’ve been using for years now, for all kinds of site scrapping, bulk domain registration without API, … and even today we use it as a part of core in our brand new Payment system.

Since I had some spare time this weekend, I finally managed to merge some of updates we’ve created during all these years and put a class to github so I can do frequent updates regularly. Don’t worry, class has retained most of it’s previous functionality explained here so update to latest version shouldn’t cause any problem.

Here’s the GitHub page: https://github.com/dinke/curl_http_client. Feel free to use it in your own projects and send in your comments.

Looking at my favorite rss feeds today, I found this post on great MySQL Performance Blog:

…if you press CTRL-C MySQL Command Line Client will not exit but will terminate query being executed.

In other words, in previous versions of MySQL client program, if you issue a query and try to interrupt it by hitting CTRL-C, CTRL-C would actually kill MySQL client itself, but query still continue running in background! In this case the only solution to really kill that query is to find it’s ID on process list (by issuing “show full processlist” query), and then to kill it with a query like “kill 12345”, where 12345 is ID of query that you want to be killed. In other words, something like this:

mysql> select * from odm_result_keywords where keyword like '%foo%joe%';
^CAborted
bash-2.05b$ mysql -A --enable-local-infile -udinke -ppass mydb
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 1512 to server version: 4.1.18-log

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> show full processlist;
+------+-------+----------------------------+-------------------+---------+------+--------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Id   | User  | Host                       | db                | Command | Time | State        | Info                                                               |
+------+-------+----------------------------+-------------------+---------+------+--------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| 1486 | dinke | localhost                  | mydb | Query   |    3 | Sending data | select * from odm_result_keywords where keyword like '%foo%joe.cl' |
+------+-------+----------------------------+-------------------+---------+------+--------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> kill 1486;
mysql>

Thanks to changes in MySQL client program, all you have to do now is to hit CTRL-C, and query will be stopped immediately:

mysql> select domain from odm_result_keywords_de where whois_status is null and domain like '%.%.%';
Query aborted by Ctrl+C
ERROR 1317 (70100): Query execution was interrupted
mysql>

For more information about this feature (as well as other changes in MySQL 5.0.25) please follow this link.

New release of PHP 5.2.0 is available for download.

Along with plenty of bugfixes, new release bring us some interesting features, the most interesting among them are hooks for tracking file upload progress , as well as new ZIP extension for creating and editing zip files.

More informations about this release can be found in the release announcement 5.2.0.

Frequently, in my daytime job I have to fetch data from various url’s, either by sending get or post request, binding to different IP address etc. Long time I used my own socket based HTTP class, although I wasn’t quite happy with perfomances and various other things with it. I already used curl cli tool (mostly for debugging purposes), but didn’t really liked it’s php api, so I’ve decided to take some spare time and make some kind of oop wrapper for it, which should be easier to use for easy stuff like sending get/post request etc.

I use this class several months since then, and it evolved over time whenever I needed some new feature. Since various of my colleagues found it very usefull (some of them even sent me new methods for it), I’ve decided to put it out for public. Recently I submitted a code to phpclasses.org, and today got confirmation that class is officially approved.

Update 03/01/2007
New version 1.1 released with new features: fetch into file, upload, proxy etc.

Update 15/02/2008
New version 1.2 released with few bug fixes. New features are ability to send post string as string argument in send_post_data method, ability to accept gzipped content, close curl session etc.

Update 25/03/2013
Version 2.0 released. Pretty much the same features as old versions, but with updated code in order to match latest PHP changes. Code will be regularly updated on github.

You can download class and example files directly from gitgub https://github.com/dinke/curl_http_client

Here are few usage examples.

<?php
/**
 * @version 2.0
 * @package dinke.net
 * @copyright © 2013 Lampix.net
 * @author Dragan Dinic 
 */

require_once("curl_http_client.php");

$curl = new Curl_HTTP_Client();

//pretend to be Firefox 19.0 on Mac
$useragent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0";
$curl->set_user_agent($useragent);

//uncomment next two lines if you want to automatically manage cookies
//which will store them to file and send them on each http request
//$cookies_file = "/tmp/cookies.txt";
//$curl->store_cookies($cookies_file);

//Uncomment next line if you want to set credentials for basic http_auth
//$curl->set_credentials($username, $password);

//Uncomment next line if you want to set specific referrer
//$curl->set_referer('http://www.foo.com/referer_url/');

//if you want to send some post data
//form post data array like this one
$post_data = array('login' => 'pera', 'password' => 'joe', 'other_foo_field' => 'foo_value');
//or like a string: $post_data = 'login=pera&password=joe&other_foo_field=foo_value';

//and send request to http://www.foo.com/login.php. Result page is stored in $html_data string
$html_data = $curl->send_post_data("http://www.foo.com/login.php", $post_data);

//You can also fetch data from somewhere using get method!
//Fetch html from url
$html_data = $curl->fetch_url("http://www.foo.com/foobar.php?login=pera&password=joe&other_foo_field=foo_value");

//if you have more than one IP on your server,
//you can also bind to specific IP address like ...
//$bind_ip = "192.168.0.1";
//$curl->fetch_url("http://www.foo.com/login.php", $bind_ip);
//$html_data = $curl->send_post_data("http://www.foo.com/login.php", $post_data, $bind_ip);

//and there are many other things you can do like

//use proxy
//$curl->set_proxy('http://www.proxyurl.com');

//get http response code for last request
//$http_code = $curl->get_http_response_code();

//get last http request duration in sec
//$duration = $curl->get_request_duration();
?>