Using Response objects

Sending a request will return a Guzzle\Http\Message\Response object. You can view the raw HTTP response message by casting the Response object to a string. Casting the response to a string will return the entity body of the response as a string too, so this might be an expensive operation if the entity body is stored in a file or network stream. If you only want to see the response headers, you can call getRawHeaders().

Response status line

The different parts of a response's status line (the first line of the response HTTP message) are easily retrievable.

$response = $client->get('http://www.amazon.com')->send();

echo $response->getStatusCode();      // >>> 200
echo $response->getReasonPhrase();    // >>> OK
echo $response->getProtocol();        // >>> HTTP
echo $response->getProtocolVersion(); // >>> 1.1

You can determine the type of the response using several helper methods:

$response->isSuccessful(); // true
$response->isInformational();
$response->isRedirect();
$response->isClientError();
$response->isServerError();

Response headers

The Response object contains helper methods for retrieving common response headers. These helper methods normalize the variations of HTTP response headers.

$response->getCacheControl();
$response->getContentType();
$response->getContentLength();
$response->getContentEncoding();
$response->getContentMd5();
$response->getEtag();
// etc... There are methods for every known response header

You can interact with the Response headers using the same exact methods used to interact with Request headers. See HTTP Message Headers for more information.

echo $response->getHeader('Content-Type');
echo $response->getHeader('Content-Length');
echo $response->getHeaders()['Content-Type']; // PHP 5.4

Response body

The entity body object of a response can be retrieved by calling $response->getBody(). The response EntityBody can be cast to a string, or you can pass true to this method to retrieve the body as a string.

$request = $client->get('http://www.amazon.com');
$response = $request->send();
echo $response->getBody();

See Request and response bodies for more information on entity bodies.

JSON Responses

You can easily parse and use a JSON response as an array using the json() method of a response. This method will always return an array if the response is valid JSON or if the response body is empty. You will get an exception if you call this method and the response is not valid JSON.

$data = $response->json();
echo gettype($data);
// >>> array

XML Responses

You can easily parse and use a XML response as SimpleXMLElement object using the xml() method of a response. This method will always return a SimpleXMLElement object if the response is valid XML or if the response body is empty. You will get an exception if you call this method and the response is not valid XML.

$xml = $response->xml();
echo $xml->foo;
// >>> Bar!

Streaming responses

Some web services provide streaming APIs that allow a client to keep a HTTP request open for an extended period of time while polling and reading. Guzzle provides a simple way to convert HTTP request messages into Guzzle\Stream\Stream objects so that you can send the initial headers of a request, read the response headers, and pull in the response body manually as needed.

Here's an example using the Twitter Streaming API to track the keyword "bieber":

use Guzzle\Http\Client;
use Guzzle\Stream\PhpStreamRequestFactory;

$client = new Client('https://stream.twitter.com/1');

$request = $client->post('statuses/filter.json', null, array(
    'track' => 'bieber'
));

$request->setAuth('myusername', 'mypassword');

$factory = new PhpStreamRequestFactory();
$stream = $factory->fromRequest($request);

// Read until the stream is closed
while (!$stream->feof()) {
    // Read a line from the stream
    $line = $stream->readLine();
    // JSON decode the line of data
    $data = json_decode($line, true);
}

You can use the stream request option when using a static client to more easily create a streaming response.

$stream = Guzzle::get('http://guzzlephp.org', array('stream' => true));
while (!$stream->feof()) {
    echo $stream->readLine();
}