Get a URL’s Reddit Score Using PHP and JSON

Written by David Walsh on Wednesday, November 11, 2009

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 = 'http://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.

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November 11 / #

James Lin says:

David, this doesn’t have anything to do with the article (which I’m sure is good but my JSON knowledge is null)… but man that top bar that follows is really funky. In my opinion, it’s distracting to the viewer who just scrolled a little and it follows but also makes it blurry up top. Now when you mouse over it, it’s great and really functional… but I don’t know if it needs to follow me as I scroll down. It reminds me of a frame but it’s even more distracting because of the aforementioned blur.

But of course that’s just me. I also loved the old bottom nav that had little icons next to AJAX, PHP, etc. Like Stewie from Family Guy once said, “I don’t like change!” … especially when it’s a distraction to the main content. But I’m sure there’ll be a lot more iterations of the site (since I’m assuming this is your playground for cool new features… and as I say that, a little cartoon David Walsh popsup as I highlight a word on the page…) so I look forward to what you come up with next =)