Y|MAIL|1

The 'Y' indicates a match was found, the 'MAIL' shows that you were testing an email address, and the '3' means that the tested item (the email address) was found 3 times in the database.

If you used the 'ALL' test and sent "http://botscout.com/test/?all=krasnhello@mail.ru", the return string might look like this:

Y|ALL|2|MAIL

The 'Y' indicates a match was found, the 'ALL' shows that you weren't explicitly specifying what kind of data you were sending, and the '3' means that the tested item was found 3 times in the database. The last item, 'MAIL' is the API's best guess at what kind of data item the API thinks you sent.

This last value can be used as a "sanity test" to make sure that the item was interpreted correctly. For example, if you're using 'ALL' to test a user name but the API thinks it's an email address, you may want to resend the data and force the API to check only user names by using a 'NAME' query. This kind of "false match" can occur because some bots will use an email address for the user name (and may use a different address for the actual email field).

Using the MULTI Query
When using the API in the Standard format with the 'multi' parameter the API will return a string which will look similar to this:

Y|MULTI|IP|3|MAIL|1|NAME|2

If any of the elements match then the first field will be a 'Y', followed by the test type indicator 'MULTI', and then each of the tested values are sent with a pipe followed by the number of matches for that item. The sample string above shows that a match was found, and that the IP matched three times, the email matched once, and the name matched twice.

If none of the items matched then first element returned as 'N' (but with the rest of the fields still present showing zero matches).

http://botscout.com/test/?all=krasnhello@mail.ru&format=xml

When XML is requested, the return values for the query above would look similar to this:

<response>
   <matched>Y</matched>
   <test>ALL</test>
   <count>2</count>
   <itemtest>NAME</itemtest>
</response>

For the 'multi' type test, the XML returned will look similar to this:

    <response>
       <type test="IP">
          <matched>Y</matched>
          <count>3</count>
       </type>
       <type test="MAIL">
          <matched>Y</matched>
          <count>0</count>
       </type>
       <type test="NAME">
          <matched>Y</matched>
          <count>2</count>
       </type>
    </response>

The field order (IP, MAIL, NAME) will not vary; all of the the top-level elements will be returned each time with a secondary 'match' and 'count' element .

Sample code for parsing XML output is available on the Sample Code page.

You may also want to use the SimpleXML extension for PHP. The SimpleXML extension provides a simple toolset to convert XML into objects that can be processed with normal property selectors and array iterators.

The tutorial from DeveloperTorials.com is also very good and provides some example code as well. It can be found here: http://www.developertutorials.com/tutorials/php/parsing-xml-using-php4-050816/page1.html