GET info from external API/URL using PHP

Question

I have the URL http://api.minetools.eu/ping/play.desnia.net/25565 which outputs statistics of my server.

For example:

{
  "description": "A Minecraft Server",
  "favicon": null,
  "latency": 64.646,
  "players": {
    "max": 20,
    "online": 0,
    "sample": []
  },
  "version": {
    "name": "Spigot 1.8.8",
    "protocol": 47
  }
}

I want to get the value of online player count to display it on my website as: Online Players: online amount

Can anyone help?

I tried to do:

<b> Online players: 

<?php
$content = file_get_contents("http://api.minetools.eu/ping/play.desnia.net/25565");
echo ($content, ["online"]);
}
?>
</b>

But it didn't work.

Answer 1

1) Don't use file_get_contents() (If you can help it)

This is because you'd need to enable fopen_wrappers to enable file_get_contents() to work on an external source. Sometimes this is closed (depending on your host; like shared hosting), so your application will break.

Generally a good alternative is curl()

2) Using curl() to perform a GET request

This is pretty straight forward. Issue a GET request with some headers using curl().

$curl = curl_init();

curl_setopt_array($curl, array(
  CURLOPT_URL => "http://api.minetools.eu/ping/play.desnia.net/25565",
  CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
  CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 30,
  CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION => CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1,
  CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST => "GET",
  CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array(
    "cache-control: no-cache"
  ),
));

$response = curl_exec($curl);
$err = curl_error($curl);

curl_close($curl);

3) Using the response

The response comes back in a JSON object. We can use json_decode() to put this into a usable object or array.

$response = json_decode($response, true); //because of true, it's in an array
echo 'Online: '. $response['players']['online'];