Get a URL’s Reddit Score Using PHP and JSON

Since we can see Digg turning more into a funny-pic-and-vid site each day, I've turned my attention to Reddit. Reddit just seems more controlled and programmer-friendly. Since I have respect for Reddit I thought I'd put together a quick tutorial on how you can retrieve a URL's Reddit score using PHP.


The PHP
<?php

/* settings */
$url = 'https://davidwalsh.name/9-signs-not-to-hire-that-web-guy';
$reddit_url = 'http://www.reddit.com/api/info.{format}?url='.$url;
$format = 'json'; //use XML if you'd like...JSON FTW!
$score = $ups = $downs = 0; //initialize

/* action */
$content = get_url(str_replace('{format}',$format,$reddit_url)); //again, can be xml or json
if($content) {
if($format == 'json') {
$json = json_decode($content,true);
foreach($json['data']['children'] as $child) { // we want all children for this example
$ups+= (int) $child['data']['ups'];
$downs+= (int) $child['data']['downs'];
//$score+= (int) $child['data']['score']; //if you just want to grab the score directly
}
$score = $ups - $downs;
}
}

/* output */
echo "Ups: $ups<br />"; //21
echo "Downs: $downs<br />"; //8
echo "Score:  $score<br />"; //13

/* utility function:  go get it! */
function get_url($url) {
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,1);
$content = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $content;
}

?>
Parsing the JSON is simple using json_encode with the value of true to make turn the JSON into an associate array. My example shows how you can grab the number of "ups" and "downs" -- not just the score. As with every API/web service, I highly recommend caching the result of your request.