common.php

<?php

function get_location_options() {
    global $libraries_url;
    $location_options = array();
    $json = get_and_cache_json('ares_libraries', $libraries_url);
    $locations = json_decode($json, true);
    foreach($locations['locationList'] as $location) {
      $location_options[$location['shortName']] = $location['name'];
    }
    asort($location_options);
    return array_merge(array('ALL' => 'All Libraries'), $location_options);
}

function get_location_ids() {
    global $libraries_url;
    $location_options = array();
    $json = get_and_cache_json('ares_libraries', $libraries_url);
    $locations = json_decode($json, true);
    foreach($locations['locationList'] as $location) {
      $location_options[$location['id']] = $location['shortName'];
    }
}

/* 
 * NOTE: this has been brought back in from cul_common
 */
function get_and_cache_json($cid, $url, $refresh = FALSE) {
  static $json;
  if (($cached = cache_get($cid, 'cache')) && ! empty($cached->data) && ! $refresh) {
    $json = $cached->data;
  }
  else {
    $json = get_json($url);
    // code offered by John Fereira to deal with encoding issues with Ares data
    $encoding =  mb_detect_encoding($json, "auto");
    $json = mb_convert_encoding($json, $encoding, "UTF-8");
    cache_set($cid, $json, 'cache');
  }
  return $json;
}

/* 
 * NOTE: this has been  brought back in from cul_common
 */
function get_json($url) {
  return file_get_contents($url);
}

/* 
 * NOTE: this has been brought back in from cul_common
 */
function output_json_string($json) {
  # drupal_json() doesn't work when you have a json string for some reason
  # even when I try to trick it with PHP's json_encode(), json_decode() combo
  # but the following works, based on code of drupal_json
  drupal_add_http_header('Content-Type', 'text/javascript; charset=utf-8');
  echo $json;
}