Programming Social Applications

GET Request

A GET request is one of the most straightforward request types. You are simply making a request to a URI endpoint and expecting some data to be returned to you.

In PHP, we can use a simple cURL request:

<?php
$url = 'http://www.example.com/request.php';

$ch = curl_init($url);
$options = array(
   CURLOPT_URL => $url,
   CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => 1
);
curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
?>

Within the cURL option, we are specifying that we want to call a specific URL (CURLOPT_URL) and would like to receive the response data from the request (CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER).

In Python, we can simply use urllib from the standard library:

import urllib

url = 'http://www.example.com/request.py'
f = urllib.urlopen(url)
response = f.read()

We open the specified URL and then read back the response from the request.