Until now JSON output has been the only way to obtain all the data flowing through a Pipe. Starting today we’ve added a second way of getting all the data - serialized PHP Pipe output.

To get this, go to your Pipe -> More options -> Get as PHP. Right click the “Get as PHP” link to copy link location (or copy shortcut if using IE).

After obtaining the link location, you can do something as simple as this to get Pipe output data as an array into your PHP script.

// Pipes Request
$req = 'http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=ZKJobpaj3BGZOew9G8evXg&_render=php‘;
// Make the request
$phpserialized = file_get_contents($req);
// Parse the serialized response
$phparray = unserialize($phpserialized);

To view the array in your web browser, use this piece of PHP code to help visualize the array.

print_r($phparray);

To view a code sample on how to do a request go here. To read more about serialized PHP at Yahoo!, go here.

It’s then up to you on how you want to display or use the Pipe data. The possibilities are endless.

Did you ever want an easy way of putting Pipes output onto your website or blog?

Introducing - Pipes badges!

We currently have three types of badges - map, image and list. Map badges are available if there is geocoded data in the feed. Image badges are available if there are media images in the feed. List badges will always be present if there is valid data.

Read more about how to configure them here.

You’ll notice that on the Pipe info pages there is a new link called “Get as a Badge.”

Click on the “Get as a Badge” link and a wizard will guide you on adding it to certain destinations like your WordPress blog, iGoogle page or any web site (that supports Javascript).

For those of you that are more technically inclined, we are using a script node replacement technique that uses JSON embedded configuration (This is based on Kent Brewsters “Case Harded Javascript”).

The Pipes team spent a hectic 24 hours as part of the recent internal Y! hack day (video coming soon) creating an iPhone interface for Pipes. We thought it was so useful we wanted to get it out as soon as possible. Now everyone can access their mash-ups while mobile by going to iphone.pipes.yahoo.com. In addition to running any of your pipes and getting the output in a suitably styled interface, one of the coolest parts of our hack was integrating Pipes with the built-in iPhone mapping application. You can put any of your geo Pipe results on the iPhone just by pressing the “Map” button:

So you can display results from Y! local, as well as answering the question posed by one of our more “urgent” Pipes: the restroom locator. Some other featured pipes that work well while mobile include Live Traffic Results (what exactly is causing that snarl up), and Price watcher - for those of us standing in Frys to work out if that really is a good deal…

We suggest tagging your pipes with “iphoneapp” so we can find and feature the best mobile mashups in the future.

We’ve added far more advanced searching, querying, and ranking capabilities to Pipes. Now you can find the types of Pipes that interest you by refining your search on a number of criteria, including the types of output they produce, what tags they have, what data sources they are mashing up, and in any combination! Pipes are also now ranked and sorted in a new way, allowing more “interesting” Pipes to appear earlier in each search.

Simply start searching in the usual way (type some text into the search box or hit “Browse”) and then you’ll get a list of attribute values down the left hand side of the page that are common to one or more of the search results. These values show you how many of the items in your search contain a particular tag, or access a certain data source, or output a given type of data and so on. Clicking on a particular value (e.g. the tag) will re-search and show only those items in your original search that also have that value. You can keep refining your search by adding more and more attribute values until you find the right Pipes. Refined too much? No problem, just go to the “Current Search” box and click on the “x” next to that value to stop restricting the results that way.

When there are more than 10 values for an attribute they become hidden. Press “More +” to the right of the attribute name (e.g. Tag, or Source) to show them all.

While every release of Pipes fixes many bugs, we don’t often talk about them. However the latest Pipes update addresses one of the biggest problems reported on the message boards and now Pipes supports a wider diversity language encodings and character sets found in many feeds. We still have a few remaining types to nail down but many more feeds should now work well.

Another frequently requested enhancement finally arrives on the Regex module, now our power users (you know who you are) can make use of the “m” “i” “g” and “s” flags.

We’ve also enabled run counting - yes, finally they’re back! We’ve re-counted all those hanging chads, errr, runs, and updated the statistics on each Pipe. Take a look at your Pipes and see how popular they have been.

Fed up with that avatar? You can now use any picture or yourself so other developers can see how pretty you really are. You can change your picture without even leaving your Pipes page:

We setup an open crossdomain.xml file at pipes.yahooapis.com. This update allows Flash developers to get the output of a Pipe in JSON or RSS formats.

To access your Pipe from Flash you need to take the following steps:

1. Find the JSON or RSS URL for the Pipe you want to call. After you run a Pipe you can find these links in the “Subscribe” tab. Here’s an example URL for the RSS feed of a Pipe:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=5BiciiOz2xGc28CWpRr.og&query=rss&username=joshua&_render=rss

2. Replace the domain name in the above URL from “yahoo” to “yahooapis”. Here’s an example of the change:
http://pipes.yahooapis.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=5BiciiOz2xGc28CWpRr.og&query=rss&username=joshua&_render=rss

It was only a matter of time before we included a module that utilized the power of regular expressions. If you’re at all familiar with them, you’ve probably already been craving for a module like this in Pipes. Now you can use Perl-like regular expressions to help you filter and replace with more flexibility. Learn more about regular expressions or check out one of our example Pipes that uses the module.

As if that wasn’t enough, we’ve also improved on the editor’s load time so when you load up a Pipe, it should load up on the canvas faster!