PHP Advanced and Object-Oriented Programming: Visual Quickpro Guide, Third Edition

10. Networking with PHP

In This Chapter

Accessing Other Web Sites

Working with Sockets

Performing IP Geolocation

Using cURL

Creating Web Services

Review and Pursue

The vast bulk of what PHP is used to do is based on taking information from the server (like a database or a text file) and sending it to the client (the end-user’s Web browser), or vice versa. But PHP also supports a slew of features for the purpose of interacting with other Web sites, communicating with other servers, and even FTP’ing files. In this chapter, I’ll discuss and demonstrate some of PHP’s network-related functions and capabilities.

In the first example, you’ll see how to read data from another Web site as if it were any old text file. In the second, a Web site verifier ...