PHP is a powerful open source server-sided scripting language that can be used on a wide variety of operating systems and webservers, including Apache on UNIX and IIS on Windows.
PHP contains numerous extensions which enable you to dynamically create images and flash files, parse xml, connect to remote servers using pop, imap, ftp, http and raw sockets, natively access many database servers including PostgreSql, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server, compress and decompress files, lookup domain names and and much more.
PHP has an excellent manual and online documentation which covers every function for every extension available.
This post shows how to extract data from an email attachment from data sent by Google Analytics with PHP. I’ve covered how to download and extract attachments with PHP’s IMAP functions in previous posts and am now coming to the end of this series finally showing how to get the data out of the attachments.
While writing my series on extracting data from Google Analytics emails with PHP I discovered PHP has a new function called str_getcsv which works the same way as fgetcsv but extracts CSV data from a string instead of from a file.
This is a supplementary post in my series about having Google Analytics data sent by email and then downloading and parsing the data with PHP. This post simply contains a PHP function for extracting all the attachments of an email using the PHP IMAP functions into an array.
At the start of 2009 I added a "Recent Posts" section to the sidebar navigation of this blog and decided I’d update it using data from Google Analytics. Unfortunately Analytics doesn’t have an API to get data but does have a function for sending data by email on regular basis either as a TSV, CSV, XML or PDF attachment.
Therefore a somewhat spordaic series of posts began appearing on this blog showing how to get Google Analytics data by email and use PHP’s IMAP functions to read through a mailbox and extract data from the attachments.
If you are getting the "Fatal error: Call to undefined function imap_open()" error in PHP when using the IMAP functions then they are not installed with your installation of PHP. This post looks at how to install the PHP IMAP functions on Debian and should also work for Ubuntu/Kubuntu/etc and other Debian derived Linux distros.
If you call the curl_init function in PHP and do not have the curl module installed you will get the error message "Fatal error: Call to undefined function curl_init() in /path/to/script.php on line XY". This post shows how to install the PHP curl module on Debian Linux and the instructions should also work on all Debian derived distros such as the Ubuntu family.