Why file_get_contents returning garbled data? - php

Question

I am trying to grab the HTML from the below page using some simple php.
URL: https://kat.cr/usearch/architecture%20category%3Abooks/
My code is:
$html = file_get_contents('https://kat.cr/usearch/architecture%20category%3Abooks/');
echo $html;
where file_get_contents works, but returns scrambled data:
I have tried using cUrl as well as various functions like: htmlentities(), mb_convert_encoding, utf8_encode and so on, but just get different variations of the scrambled text.
The source of the page says it is charset=utf-8, but I am not sure what the problem is.
Calling file_get_contents() on the base url kat.cr returns the same mess.
What am I missing here?

Answer 1

It is GZ compressed and when fetched by the browser the browser decompresses this, so you need to decompress. To output it as well you can use readgzfile():
readgzfile('https://kat.cr/usearch/architecture%20category%3Abooks/');

Answer 2

Your site response is being compressed, therefore you've to uncompress in order to convert it to the original form.
The quickest way is to use gzinflate() as below:
$html = gzinflate(substr(file_get_contents("https://kat.cr/usearch/architecture%20category%3Abooks/"), 10, -8));
Or for more advanced solution, please consider the following function (found at this blog):
function get_url($url)
{
//user agent is very necessary, otherwise some websites like google.com wont give zipped content
$opts = array(
'http'=>array(
'method'=>"GET",
'header'=>"Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8rn" .
"Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdchrn" .
"Accept-Charset:UTF-8,*;q=0.5rn" .
"User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0 FirePHP/0.4rn"
)
);
$context = stream_context_create($opts);
$content = file_get_contents($url ,false,$context);
//If http response header mentions that content is gzipped, then uncompress it
foreach($http_response_header as $c => $h)
{
if(stristr($h, 'content-encoding') and stristr($h, 'gzip'))
{
//Now lets uncompress the compressed data
$content = gzinflate( substr($content,10,-8) );
}
}
return $content;
}
echo get_url('http://www.google.com/');