Getting the JSON reponse from an API with Laravel

Question

I am just messing with APIs and now I'm trying to use Google Directions API in my app.

I made a form to get the user's input and retrieve this data and create the URI just in the routes.php file:

Route::get('/directions', function() {
    $origin = Input::get('origin');
    $destination = Input::get('destination');

    $url = "http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/directions/json?origin=" . $origin . "&destination=" . $destination . "&sensor=false";
});

That URL's response is a JSON. But now, how am I supposed to store that response with Laravel? I have been looking at the Http namespace in Laravel and I didn't find a way. If it can't be done with Laravel, how can it be done with plain php?

Solution 1

You can use file_get_contents()

Route::get('/directions', function() {
    $origin = Input::get('origin');
    $destination = Input::get('destination');

    $url = urlencode ("http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/directions/json?origin=" . $origin . "&destination=" . $destination . "&sensor=false");

    $json = json_decode(file_get_contents($url), true);

    dd($json);
});

Solution 2

you can try this step...

set route...

Route::get('/json', [yourController::class, 'getJSON']);

and the method for get value as json format

public function getJSON(Request $request)
{

    $url = 'https://api******';

    $response = file_get_contents($url);
    $newsData = json_decode($response);


    return response()->json($newsData);         

}

Solution 3

Take a look at my package

https://github.com/joshhornby/Http

Hopefully makes it a little easier to call APIs

Comments

[dabadaba]

thanks, that gets closer to what I wanted. However, 1: doesn't laravel provide any way to do this? and 2, I'm getting a 400 Bad Request with some characters. I tried wrapping the result of file_get_contents with utf8_encode but it doesn't do the trick. Any ideas?

[dabadaba]

also dd is not "pretty printing" for some reason

[Laurence]

dd is just to dump the variable to show you it works. You can do whatever you want with the variable to print it how you want.

[Laurence]

As for "doesn't laravel provide any way to do this" - this is the way you do it. The other option is to use a package like Guzzle and curl the request - github.com/guzzle/guzzle

[Laurence]

Finally - I have modified my answer to include urlencode() to make it work for the other chars

[dabadaba]

I tried urlencode() too but it does not work: file_get_contents(http%3A%2F%2Fmaps.googleapis.com%2Fmaps%2F‌​api%2Fdirections%2Fj‌​son%3Forigin%3Dlos+a‌​ngeles%26destination‌​%3Dnew+york%26sensor‌​%3Dfalse): failed to open stream: No such file or directory The only thing that works is replacing white spaces with %20 but this seems like an odd solution (I have encountered this in the past with a webapp made with python).

[dabadaba]

I'll give it a look, looks good. I hope Laravel implements such thing.

[Jared Smith]

"Take a look at my package" did you do that on purpose or was it inadvertent?

[Pooya Estakhri]

@JaredSmith pointing out the response->json() justifies it, also this is first result when searching for laravel json api so question’s age does not matter