Getting Education with Facebook Graph API in PHP

Question

I'm trying to get the education info from Facebook's graph API using stdclass. here's the array:

 "username": "blah",
   "education": [
      {
         "school": {
            "id": "[removed]",
            "name": "[removed]"
         },
         "year": {
            "id": "[removed]",
            "name": "[removed]"
         },
         "type": "High School"
      },
      {
         "school": {
            "id": "[removed]",
            "name": "[removed]"
         },
         "year": {
            "id": "[removed]",
            "name": "[removed]"
         },
         "type": "College"
      }
   ],

How can I use PHP to select the one with type "college"? Here's what I'm using to read it:

 $token_url = "https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?"
   . "client_id=[removed]&redirect_uri=[removed]&client_secret=[removed]&code=".$_GET['code']."";


 $response = file_get_contents($token_url);


 parse_str($response);

 $graph_url = "https://graph.facebook.com/me?access_token=" 
   . $access_token;


     $user = json_decode(file_get_contents($graph_url));

So the name would be $user->name.

I tried $user->education->school but that didn't work.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Education in your JSON document is an array (notice that its items are surrounded by [ ]), so what you have to do is:

// To get the college info in $college
$college = null;
foreach($user->education as $education) {
    if($education->type == "College") {
        $college = $education;
        break;
    }
}

if(empty($college)) {
    echo "College information was not found!";
} else {
    var_dump($college);
}

The result would be something like:

object(stdClass)[5]
  public 'school' => 
    object(stdClass)[6]
      public 'id' => string '[removed]' (length=9)
      public 'name' => string '[removed]' (length=9)
  public 'year' => 
    object(stdClass)[7]
      public 'id' => string '[removed]' (length=9)
      public 'name' => string '[removed]' (length=9)
  public 'type' => string 'College' (length=7)

An easier trick would be to use json_decode with the second param set to true, which forces the results to be arrays and not stdClass.

$user = json_decode(file_get_contents($graph_url), true);

If you go with arrays, you have to change the college retrieval foreach to:

foreach($user["education"] as $education) {
    if($education["type"] == "College") {
        $college = $education;
        break;
    }
} 

and the result will be:

array
  'school' => 
    array
      'id' => string '[removed]' (length=9)
      'name' => string '[removed]' (length=9)
  'year' => 
    array
      'id' => string '[removed]' (length=9)
      'name' => string '[removed]' (length=9)
  'type' => string 'College' (length=7)

Although both are valid, in my opinion you should go with arrays, they are easier and more flexible for what you want to do.