NYCPHP Meetup

[Jayesh Sheth]

Hello all,

Thanks for all of your replies and help. Before I read your replies, I 
tried to send this message (at first with  code sample attachments).  
Thanks very much to drydell for porting the code snippet I posted from 
Perl to PHP and for the others who recommended Curl and the other open 
source Fedex code. I have now made available all the relevant code that 
I found (and other bits posted to this list)  at my website ( 
http://www.ceruleansky.com/code/usps_php/ ) . I can also make a 
sourceforge project with the new code I come up with, since this seems 
to be of interest to others.

Here is an edited copy of the email I wanted to send:
 
I think I just found some sample PHP code which works with the USPS's 
web services interface. It is part of the OsCommerce ( 
www.oscommerce.com ) shipping module. I thought I would share this code 
with all of you, since it might be useful to others.

It calls a different remote (USPS) function to do determine shipping 
costs for a package of a certain weight; thus, it does something 
different than what I wanted to do (look up the zip code for an address) 
- but still, the methodology of making the XML request and receiving the 
XML response is the same.

The method from OsCommerce (along with other relevant code) is available 
for others' reference (it can be found in 
root/catalog/includes/modules/shipping/usps.php) at:

http://www.ceruleansky.com/code/usps_php/

Here is (part of) the answer to my earlier question, though (it is a 
snippet from the usps module of osCommerce):
------
$http = new httpClient();
     if ($http->Connect($usps_server, 80)) {
       $http->addHeader('Host', $usps_server);
       $http->addHeader('User-Agent', 'osCommerce');
       $http->addHeader('Connection', 'Close');

       if ($http->Get('/' . $api_dll . '?' . $request)) $body = 
$http->getBody();

       $http->Disconnect();
     } else {
       return false;
     }
-----
(Oddly enough, the code above seems to be making a GET request).

The httpClient object is something unique to to osCommerce, and is found 
in root/catalog/includes/classes/httpclient.php. Other options to do the 
same thing are the PEAR library at 
http://pear.php.net/package/HTTP_Client , or something like Simon 
Willison's httpClient() library found at: 
http://scripts.incutio.com/httpclient/index.php

If the PHP code  that I come up with to look up zip codes from an 
address (using USPS web services) is of interest to others, I could make 
a project for it at sourceforge.net.

Best Regards,

- Jay