file_get_contents synchronous or asynchronous

Question

Today I came across one situation.

I am using file_get_contents to get token from a file for a user.

$data=file_get_contents("http://example.com/aaa.php?user=tester&akey=abcdef1234");
$dec=json_decode($data,true);
$tokenid=$dec['message']['result']['tokenid'];

Using the token i will call another file to get details;

$data=file_get_contents("http://example.com/bbb.php?user=tester&token=".$tokenid);

the problem is sometimes i am not getting tokenid, after refreshing the page i get it.

There is no problem in aaa.php its working fine.

I doubt whether php is not waiting for the response of the file_get_contents of token before going to the second file_get_contents(asynchronous);

I have tried with curl too but sometimes I am not getting tokenid. I haven't faced these kind of issues.

Answer 1

Definitely not a question of synchronous vs. asynchronous. But as is debugging is pretty impossible. Try something like this. The die statements are ugly but illustrates the validation you might want to incorporate...

$data = file_get_contents("http://example.com/aaa.php?user=tester&akey=abcdef1234");
if (empty($data)) die('Failed to fetch data');

$dec = json_decode($data, true);
if (is_null($dec) || $dec === false) die('Failed to decode data');

$tokenid = isset($dec['message']['result']['tokenid']) ? $dec['message']['result']['tokenid'] : null;
if (is_null($tokenid) die('Token ID is not set');

//...

$data=file_get_contents("http://example.com/bbb.php?user=tester&token=".$tokenid);

A guess might be your token sometimes contains 'special' characters that need to be escaped.

Answer 2

file_get_contents is synchronous. You can get FALSE sometimes because of different reasons like network fail, DNS fail etc.

Use curl instead: it's faster and more customizable. You can wait for good response recursive if you need 100% success.