[RESOLVED] Displaying data from a table in another site's database?

[peanutgallery83]

As the title said...is it possible to grab information out of a DB table in on another website's server?

I have two sites, different addresses, different servers. Is it possible that if I have info stored in table "Names" on site A, that I can display that list on site B?

I'm assuming if it's possible that it will involve changes to this code, but nothing has worked:

require($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/include/display_homepage_news.php');

//set up table and database names
$db_name ="ref_rms";
$table_name ="NewsArticles";

//connect to server and select database
$connection =@mysql_connect("localhost","userame","password") or die(mysql_error());
$db =@mysql_select_db($db_name,$connection) or die(mysql_error());

Thanks in advance for any help.

[etully]

There are two ways to do it.

1. You can configure the database on site A to allow connections from a remote server. Then you write your database connection script on site B to connect to a remote server. (In your example, you change "localhost" to the name of the remote server. I try to avoid this option because not all hosts allow databases to accept connections from outside servers.

2. You can write a PHP script on site A that reads the contents of the database and builds a table. Then on site B, you use fopen/fread to grab the contents of that web page into a string. Then you can include that string into the web page that you are building on site B. I prefer this method. Sometimes I let site A actually construct the HTML of how the table will be displayed. Sometimes I have it build XML so that site B can reformat it if necessary. Also, the PHP script on site A should allow some arguments to be passed in so that site B can define what data should appear in this table.

[peanutgallery83]

Is there any chance you (or someone) could help me with an example. I tried looking at the fopen stuff (the method that I would prefer to use) on php.net and am just not getting it....

For sake of an example, let's say I am trying to display the content of a page from site A (where the info displayed is pulled from the DB on site A) - obviously this is a simplified example; but if I can see how to do this with something like this I can apply to my much larger system):

//set up table and database names
$db_name ="DB_siteA";
$table_name ="table_siteA";

//connect to server and select database
$connection =@mysql_connect("localhost","username_siteA","password_siteA") or die(mysql_error());
$db =@mysql_select_db($db_name,$connection) or die(mysql_error());

//build and issue query
$sql = "SELECT reg_id,  reg_name";

$result = @mysql_query($sql,$connection)or die(mysql_error());

//create list block of results
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
	$reg_id = $row['reg_id'];
	$reg_name = $row['reg_name'];	

 }

//HTML CODE WOULD BE HERE
//INSIDE THE BODY SOMEWHERE I DISPLAY the reg_name variable:

echo "$reg_name"

On site B, I want do make it display the $reg_name variable from site A onto a page....what do I need to do (on both ends) to make this happen?

Thanks again!

[leatherback]

You owuld ideally have the $reg_name be the only output by the script, so that you do not need to process the content, but can read spit out whatever you read. Then you can use the example I stole from the user contributions in the manual:

  $filename = "http://www.site.com/page.php" ;
  $dataFile = fopen( $filename, "r" ) ;

  if ( $dataFile )
  {
   while (!feof($dataFile))
   {
       $buffer = fgets($dataFile, 4096);
       echo $buffer;
   }

   fclose($dataFile);
  }
  else
  {
   die( "fopen failed for $filename" ) ;
  }

[peanutgallery83]

Thank you so much, that's exactly what I needed. I saw that when I looked at the manual but it didn't register that that's what I needed.

Thank you!