Invalid cookies recieved from CURL request and file_get_contents - php

Question

I am receiving an invalid cookie string when trying capture the cookie using file_get_contents and curl. The cookie received while browsing directly from the browser is valid/active. But, the cookie captured from file_get_contents and curl seems to be invalid.
I am trying to capture from file_get_contents like this
$context = array(
'http' => array(
'method' => 'GET',
'header' => array('Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*\/*;q=0.8', 'User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/63.0.3239.84 Chrome/63.0.3239.84 Safari/537.36'),
)
);
$cxContext = stream_context_create($context);
file_get_contents($url, false, $cxContext);
$cookies = array();
foreach ($http_response_header as $hdr) {
if (preg_match('/^Set-Cookie:\s*([^;]+)/', $hdr, $matches)) {
$cookies = $matches[1];
}
}
return $cookies;
I tried playing around with this, by setting headers, but the cookies returned always is either expired or simply invalid.
But, through a browser the cookie I get is always valid.
Anyone faced a similar problem, don't know how to tackle this issue.

Answer 1

There are several unanswered questions from my above comment, but I'll share this bit of code for example purposes. It's what I've used in the past as a base class for browser emulation using cURL:
<?php
if(!function_exists("curl_init")) { throw new Exception("CurlBrowser requires the cURL extension, which is not enabled!"); }
class CurlBrowser
{
public $userAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0";
/*
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0.1");
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0
*/
public $cookiesFile = null;
public $proxyURL = null;
public $saveLastOutput = "";
public $caBundle = "cacert.pem";
public $httpHeaders = array();
public function __construct($UseCookies = true)
{
if(is_bool($UseCookies) && $UseCookies)
{
$this->cookiesFile = dirname(__FILE__)."/cookies.txt";
}
elseif(is_string($UseCookies) && ($UseCookies != ""))
{
$this->cookiesFile = $UseCookies;
}
}
public function SetCustomHTTPHeaders($arrHeaders)
{
$this->httpHeaders = $arrHeaders;
}
public function SetProxy($proxy)
{
$this->proxyURL = $proxy;
}
public function Get($url)
{
return $this->_request($url);
}
public function Post($url,$data = array())
{
return $this->_request($url,$data);
}
private function _request($form_url,$data = null)
{
$ch = curl_init($form_url);
// CA bundle
$caBundle = $this->caBundle;
if(file_exists($caBundle))
{
// Detect and convert relative path to absolute path
if(basename($caBundle) == $caBundle)
{
$caBundle = getcwd() . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . $caBundle;
}
// Set CA bundle
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CAINFO, $caBundle);
}
// Cookies
if($this->cookiesFile !== null)
{
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $this->cookiesFile);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $this->cookiesFile);
}
// User Agent
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $this->userAgent);
// Misc
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, "gzip, deflate");
// Optional proxy
if($this->proxyURL !== null)
{
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, $this->proxyURL);
}
// Custom HTTP headers
if(count($this->httpHeaders))
{
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $this->httpHeaders);
}
// POST data
if($data !== null)
{
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
}
// Run operation
$result = curl_exec($ch);
if($result === false)
{
throw new Exception(curl_error($ch));
}
else
{
if(!empty($this->saveLastOutput))
{
file_put_contents($this->saveLastOutput,$result);
}
return $result;
}
}
}
?>
You'd use it like so:
<?php
$browser = new CurlBrowser();
$html = $browser->Get("https://....");
...etc...
My gut guess is that you're simply missing a cookie jar in your original code, but that's mostly based on gut feeling, since we don't have all your problem code at this time.