Flickr Picture Scraper Class

This class was created for a clients project of mine. All I required was the thumbnails of the last 6 pictures which linked to the real pictures. I purposely decided to go old school and just scrape the flickr site for the photos rather than implement the API.
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<?php

/*
*
*    This is a flickr script that will grab thumbnails from a
*    flickr account by scraping the site. I created this with
*    intentionally without usage of the API. It also contains
*    a caching feature.
*
*    Example usage:
*    $flickr = new flickr($flickr_username);
*    $thumbs_arr = $flickr->thumbs();
*    $pics_arr = $flickr->pics();
*/

class flickr {

    private $username, $rss, $id, $limit, $thumbs, $pics;
    
    // takes the username as a required field and can optionally limit amount of pics
    public function __construct($username, $limit = 6){
        $this->username = $username;
        $this->limit = $limit;
        // if its not in the cache grab from flickr
        if(!$this->check_cache()){
            $this->get_id();
            $this->get_rss();
            $this->get_pics();
            $this->write_cache();
        }
    }
    
    // check the cache in the tmp dir, cache lasts 1 hour
    private function check_cache(){
        $timestamp = mktime(date('G'), 0, 0); // the hour
        if(file_exists('/tmp/flickr_'.$timestamp.'.txt')){
            $json = file_get_contents('/tmp/flickr_'.mktime(date('G'), 0, 0).'.txt');
            $json_obj = json_decode($json);
            $this->thumbs = $json_obj->thumbs;
            $this->pics = $json_obj->pics;
            return true;
        }
        return false;
    }
    
    // write the arrays of thumbs and pics to the cache
    private function write_cache(){
        $timestamp = mktime(date('G'), 0, 0); // the hour
        file_put_contents('/tmp/flickr_'.$timestamp.'.txt', json_encode(array('pics' => $this->pics, 'thumbs' => 
$this->thumbs)));
    }
    
    // delete the cache if for any reason we want fresh results
    public function delete_cache(){
        $timestamp = mktime(date('G'), 0, 0); // the hour
        unlink('/tmp/flickr_'.$timestamp.'.txt');
    }
    
    // get the flickr id from the username
    private function get_id(){
        $flickr_page = file_get_contents('http://flickr.com/photos/'.$this->username);
        preg_match('|id=(.+)@|i', $flickr_page, $matches);
        $this->id = $matches[1];
    }
    
    // get the rss feed for the photostream
    private function get_rss(){
        $feed_url = 'http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id='.$this->id.'@N00&lang=en-us&format=rss_200';
        $this->rss = file_get_contents($feed_url);
    }
    
    // get hte pics and thumbs from the photostream
    private function get_pics(){
        preg_match_all('/media:thumbnail url="(.+)" height="75" width="75"/i', $this->rss, $matches);
        preg_match_all('/media:content url="(.+)"/i', $this->rss, $matches2);
        $i = 0;
        foreach($matches[1] as $thumb){
            $this->thumbs[] = $thumb;
            $this->pics[] = $matches2[1][$i];
            $i++;
        }
    }
    
    // return the thumbs, using limit
    public function thumbs(){
        return array_slice($this->thumbs, 0, $this->limit, true);
    }
    
    // return the pics, using limit
    public function pics(){
        return array_slice($this->pics, 0, $this->limit, true);
    }

}


?>
TamDenholm

Flickr Picture Scraper Class
