Thanks for the share Dave! I am really glad this article helped you too. DreamHost is building a great API that is useful for all sorts of domain admin scenarios.

Here’s the cleanup for the response testing:

$result will be ===FALSE if the curl operation itself fails.
(yes, triple equals.)

if (stripos($a,$b)>1) is an improper test, please see:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.stripos.php

To correct the code above, you need to change:
if ( stripos( $result,’success’) > 0){
to
if ( $result!==false && stripos( $result,’success’)!==false){

This is because stripos returns logical false if it doesn’t find it.
Another neat (perhaps better?) way to test would be !strncasecmp($result,’success’,7)

Also in your errorcode handling, you probably want to test the case where $result===false and report that as a failure to connect to the server.

Thanks very much, this tutorial helped me A LOT!!

Dave.

I got it. The answer is in the PHP manual entry for curl_exec()

“Returns TRUE on success or FALSE on failure. However, if the CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER option is set, it will return the result on success, FALSE on failure. ”

The way you’ve got it set up you are returning TRUE or FALSE in $result, but you are checking for the result (i.e. ‘success’).

So if you add the line

curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);

The ‘stripos’ line should work correctly.

Colin

Just re-read your response and took it in a bit more. You say

“So the code you reference checks if the result contains success. (stripos returns 0 if false, otherwise the position), so we check that it is greater than zero, is that the “1″ your referring to?”

That’s what I thought it was doing. You’re checking for the string ‘success’ in $result, right? But I checked the value of $result, and it doesn’t contain a string.
In the case of a successful operation it contains the value ’1′ (at least when I run it), which is presumably why the ‘stripos’ line return an error. Maybe the Dreamhost guys changed something? It seems to be that $result contains a boolean value, not a string.

Colin

I just changed the code to check for ’1′ in $result, and it worked, in the sense that it no longer gave me the error message.

The thing is, the functionality worked fine, it did what it was supposed to (add a subscriber to the list), but it was giving me the output of the

echo ” Ooops! Unable to add your email to our announcement list please contact site administrator.”;
echo “Code: ” . $result;

line, as if it hadn’t worked (when it had).

I thought that ‘stripos’ was checking for a particular text string in $result, which wasn’t there, but maybe I misread that?

Anyway, as I say, it seems to be working ok for me having made that one change, I just thought I’d give you the feedback on it. It does the job fine!

Colin

When I wrote the article above it worked, and was based on the API documentation, http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Api#announcement_list-add_subscriber, which states;

Result:

success
sent_opt_in_email

Possible Errors:

no_listname
no_domain
no_such_listname
no_such_domain
no_email
invalid_email (may have specifics after a tab)
already_subscribed
email_may_not_be_added_to_any_dreamhost_list_ever
email_requested_to_be_added_in_last_two_days_already
internal_error_opting_in

So the code you reference checks if the result contains success. (stripos returns 0 if false, otherwise the position), so we check that it is greater than zero, is that the “1″ your referring to?

You could use a series of if/else blocks to handle any scenario.

Do you have php debugging on? are you seeing any specific errors?

Thanks for the code, very useful However, I’m not sure if the line

if ( stripos( $result,’success’) > 0){

is right? I seem to be getting a ’1′ as the response in $result. Maybe boolean ‘true’? Leaving the code as above results in an error, although the subscription succeeds, and I get the ‘success subscribed’ text ok, but it just appears in the form response page. I think the error was because $result doesn’t contain the ‘success subscribed’ response that your code seems to expect?

Maybe that needs to be handled differently.

Colin