Easily including a file from another site

I have a script that runs on a site completely separate from mine. When I run it, the result of that script is a number - that's it. No HTML around it or anything.

I want to be able to drop that result into a single variable as easily as possible. Something like:

$the_result = file("http://www.whatever.com/specialscript.php");

Of course, doing that puts the result in an array, which I'd need to go through.

I'm going to have to call this script on a variety of servers quite often, so I need the most efficient way to get the result back. Make sense?

 

$myvar = file_get_contents($url);

PHP:

Does exactly what you want, gets the result of a URL and returns it as a string.

 

Yeah, that was way too easy.

Thanks!

 

One more quick question about this. If the file isn't there (404), it comes back ugly (big error message on the page).

How can I trap that error and display my own error message?

 

<?
if (strpos($mystr, "404") === true) {
$mystr = "There was an error";
}
?>

 

The problem is that as soon as I run file_get_contents the error appears. I could see that and show a custom error after the fact, but the mess is already on their screen. How can I prevent that?

 

You can hide the error using the @ syntax:

$myvar = @file_get_contents($url);

Code (markup):

 

That's what I was after. Thanks!

 

Ok, now another problem. For one of them, I'm getting the following error:

Warning: file_get_contents() [function.file-get-contents]: php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: Name or service not known in /home/xxxxxx/public_html/cron/userposts.php on line 23

Warning: file_get_contents(http://www.xxx.com/file.php?userid=57) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: Success in /home/xxxxxx/public_html/cron/userposts.php on line 23

Code (markup):

Any ideas? The addresses are correct and I can pull them up in a browser.