Multiple input (q parameters) in Google Translate API , with PHP CURL

Question

When we make a query to [Translate API][1]:

function curl($url, $post_array=false){ 
        $handle = curl_init();
        if (FALSE === $handle) 
            throw new Exception('failed to CURL initialize; '. __FILE__);
        curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
        curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
        curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
        if($post_array) {
            curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1 );
            curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post_array );
        } 
        curl_setopt($handle,CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER,array('X-HTTP-Method-Override: GET'));
        $response = curl_exec($handle);
        return $response;
}


var_dump ( curl("https://www.googleapis.com/language/translate/v2", ['key'=>$key, 'q[]'=>"hello", 'q[]'=>"world", 'source'=>"en", 'target'=>'ru']   ) );

ends in error:

{
  "error": {
    "code": 400,
    "message": "Required Text",
    "errors": [
      {
        "message": "Required Text",
        "domain": "global",
        "reason": "required"
      }
    ]
  }
}

How to send multiple q input texts? As I see, the API doesn't allow q[] type arrays, instead it uses multiple q parameters. But in php we can't have same key multiple times in array...

Answer 1

i believe this API supports JSON, and JSON supports arrays, so just do

function curl($url, array $post_array){ 
        $handle = curl_init();
        curl_setopt_array($ch,array(
CURLOPT_POST=>1,
CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS=>json_encode($post_data),
CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER=>array('Content-Type: application/json')
));
(...)
}

and call it like

var_dump ( curl("https://www.googleapis.com/language/translate/v2",
 ['key'=>$key, 'q'=>array("hello","world"),
 'source'=>"en", 'target'=>'ru']   ) );

Answer 2

You should encode the post fields. PHP offers http_build_query .

function curl($url, $post_array=false){ 
        $handle = curl_init();
        if (FALSE === $handle) 
            throw new Exception('failed to CURL initialize; '. __FILE__);
        curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
        curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
        curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
        if($post_array) {
            curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1 );
            curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($post_array) );
        } 
        curl_setopt($handle,CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER,array('X-HTTP-Method-Override: GET'));
        $response = curl_exec($handle);
        return $response;
}


var_dump ( curl("https://www.googleapis.com/language/translate/v2", ['key'=>$key, 'q'=> array("hello", "world"), 'source'=>"en", 'target'=>'ru']   ) );

Relevant are this post and this post .

Answer 3

As suggested in a comment, rather than using an array where there can not be repeated keys in the POSTFIELDS data array ( or any array in PHP ) you can supply a string for the POST data

My curl function

function curl( $url=NULL, $options=NULL ){
    $cacert='c:/wwwroot/cacert.pem';    #<---- edit to suit
    $vbh = fopen('php://temp', 'w+');


    $res=array(
        'response'  =>  NULL,
        'info'      =>  array( 'http_code' => 100 ),
        'headers'   =>  NULL,
        'errors'    =>  NULL
    );
    if( is_null( $url ) ) return (object)$res;

    session_write_close();

    /* Initialise curl request object */
    $curl=curl_init();
    if( parse_url( $url,PHP_URL_SCHEME )=='https' ){
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, true );
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 2 );
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_CAINFO, $cacert );
    }

    /* Define standard options */
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_URL,trim( $url ) );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, false );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT, false );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER, true );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 20 );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 60 );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36' );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 10 );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_ENCODING, '' );

    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, true );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_NOPROGRESS, true );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_STDERR, $vbh );



    /* Assign runtime parameters as options */
    if( isset( $options ) && is_array( $options ) ){
        foreach( $options as $param => $value ) curl_setopt( $curl, $param, $value );
    }

    /* Execute the request and store responses */
    $res=(object)array(
        'response'  =>  curl_exec( $curl ),
        'info'      =>  (object)curl_getinfo( $curl ),
        'errors'    =>  curl_error( $curl )
    );
    rewind( $vbh );
    $res->verbose=stream_get_contents( $vbh );
    fclose( $vbh );
    curl_close( $curl );
    return $res;
}

The configuration for the request:

$key='AIzaSyxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx9oIhY8Q8xxxxx';

$url='https://www.googleapis.com/language/translate/v2';
$arr=array( 'another', 'elephant', 'banana', 'woman' );

/* some translate parameters */
$params=array(
    'target'    =>  'fr',
    'format'    =>  'text',
    'source'    =>  'en',
    'model'     =>  'nmt'
);
/* the POST data */
$query=implode( '&', array( 
    sprintf( 'key=%s&q=%s',$key, implode( '&q=', $arr ) ), #query
    urldecode( http_build_query( $params ) ) #google params
));

$config=array(
    CURLOPT_POST        =>  true,
    CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS  =>  $query
);

$res=curl( $url, $config );
if( $res->info->http_code==200 ){
    printf('<pre>%s</pre>',print_r( $res->response,true ) );
}

Appears to work OK and returns:

{
  "data": {
    "translations": [
      {
        "translatedText": "un autre",
        "model": "nmt"
      },
      {
        "translatedText": "l'éléphant",
        "model": "nmt"
      },
      {
        "translatedText": "banane",
        "model": "nmt"
      },
      {
        "translatedText": "femme",
        "model": "nmt"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Answer 4

For others finding their way here and looking for how to translate multiple texts in a simple GET-request to the Google Cloud Translation v2 REST API , you just need to add multiple q= parameters to your URL.

No need to mess around with cURL, just use file_get_contents and get on with your life. Something like this would do the job:

$texts = ['foo', 'bar', 'hello world'];

// Translate from english to swedish
$queryParams = [
    'target' => 'sv',
    'source' => 'en',
    'format' => 'text',
    'key'    => 'INSERT_YOUR_API_KEY_HERE',
];

// Now let's add q=<text> for each text
$queryString = http_build_query($queryParams);
foreach($texts as $t){
    $queryString .= '&q='.rawurlencode($t);
}

$url = "https://translation.googleapis.com/language/translate/v2?$queryString";

$responseBody = file_get_contents($url);
$responseArr = json_decode($responseBody, true);

Answer 5

you should use q parameter as json_encode(array($text1,$text2))

this is my well-worked code snippet.

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://translation.googleapis.com/language/translate/v2?API-KEY');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
$text1="The Great Pyramid of Giza (also known as the Pyramid of Khufu or the Pyramid of Cheops) is the oldest and largest of the three pyramids in the Giza pyramid complex.";
$text2="this is second text example";
$post = array(
    'q'=> json_encode(array($text1,$text2)),
    'source'=>"en",
    'target'=> "sr",//serbian sr
    'format'=>"text",   
);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
if (curl_errno($ch)) {
    echo 'Error:' . curl_error($ch);
}
curl_close($ch);
$result=json_decode($response,true);
print_r($result['data']['translations']);