How can PHP developers effectively utilize the RESTful API provided by Instagram to access and display data such as likes and comments?

To effectively utilize the RESTful API provided by Instagram to access and display data such as likes and comments, PHP developers can make use of cURL to send HTTP requests to the Instagram API endpoints. They can authenticate their requests using OAuth tokens and handle the JSON responses to extract and display the desired data.

<?php
$access_token = 'YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN';
$user_id = 'USER_ID';

$url = 'https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/' . $user_id . '/media/recent/?access_token=' . $access_token;

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

$data = json_decode($response, true);

foreach ($data['data'] as $post) {
    echo 'Likes: ' . $post['likes']['count'] . '<br>';
    echo 'Comments: ' . $post['comments']['count'] . '<br>';
}
?>