Alternative of file_get_contents function - php

Question

I am trying to get json data from https://nepse-data-api.herokuapp.com/data/todaysprice.
I use file_get_contents() function but I got below error msg
Message: require(): https:// wrapper is disabled in the server
configuration by allow_url_fopen=0
Now my problem is I am using shared hosting so allow_url_fopen = 1 is not possible.
How can I get the data from above url.
In localhost this code is working properly, Here is my code
$url = 'https://nepse-data-api.herokuapp.com/data/todaysprice';
$raw = file_get_contents($url);
$data = json_decode($raw);

Answer 1

In case you’re using PHP to retrieve data from a certain server you probably came across the problem that it may work for you but a client complained about lots of errors. It’s pretty likely that you’ve relied on the fact that allow_url_fopen is set to true. This way you can put pretty much anything – local path or a URL – into function calls like include or maybe simplexml_load_file.
If you’d like to get around this problem you can advice your client to make the necessary changes in his php.ini file. Most of the time this isn’t an option because the hosting company decided to disable this feature for security reasons. Since almost everybody got cURL installed we can use this to retrieve data from another web server.
Implementation
I’ll present a wrapper that helps you loading an XML file. It uses simplexml_load_file if allow_url_fopen is enabled. If this feature is disabled it employs simplexml_load_string and cURL. If none of this works we’ll throw an exception because we weren’t able to load the data.
class XMLWrapper {
public function loadXML($url) {
if (ini_get('allow_url_fopen') == true) {
return $this->load_fopen($url);
} else if (function_exists('curl_init')) {
return $this->load_curl($url);
} else {
// Enable 'allow_url_fopen' or install cURL.
throw new Exception("Can't load data.");
}
}
private function load_fopen($url) {
return simplexml_load_file($url);
}
private function load_curl($url) {
$curl = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
return simplexml_load_string($result);
}
}
//For Json
class JsonWrapper {
public function loadJSON($url) {
if (ini_get('allow_url_fopen') == true) {
return $this->load_fopen($url);
} else if (function_exists('curl_init')) {
return $this->load_curl($url);
} else {
// Enable 'allow_url_fopen' or install cURL.
throw new Exception("Can't load data.");
}
}
private function load_fopen($url) {
$raw = file_get_contents($url);
$data = json_decode($raw);
return $data;
}
private function load_curl($url) {
$curl = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
$data = json_decode($result);
return $data;
}
}
The code is pretty simple, create an instance of the given class and call the loadXML method. It’ll call the right private method which finally loads the XML. Loading some XML is just an example, you can use this technique with e.g. include or require too.