Can't load the XML file? - php

Question

http://westwood-backup.com/podcast?categoryID2=403
This is the XML file that i want to load and echo via PHP. I tried file_get_contents and load. Both of are return empty string. If i change the URL as another XML file, functions works great. What can be special about the URL?
<?php
$content = file_get_contents("http://westwood-backup.com/podcast?categoryID2=403");
echo $content;
?>
Another try with load, same empty result.
<?php
$feed = new DOMDocument();
if (#$feed->load("http://westwood-backup.com/podcast?categoryID2=403")) {
$xpath = new DOMXpath($feed);
$linkPath = $xpath->query("/rss/channel/link");
echo $linkPath
}
?>

Answer 1

Use CURL and you can do it like this:
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,'http://westwood-backup.com/podcast?categoryID2=403');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, ' Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0d; Windows NT)');
$xml = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
echo "<pre>";
print_r($xml);
echo "</pre>";
Outputs:
I think the server implements a "User-Agent" check to make sure the XML data is only loaded within a browser (not via bots/file_get_contents etc...)
so, by using CURL and setting a dummy user-agent, you can get around the check and load the data.

Answer 2

You need to set a useragent header that the server is happy with. No need for cUrl if you dont want to use it, you can use stream_context_create with file_get_contents:
$options = array(
'http'=>array(
'method'=>"GET",
'header'=>"Accept-language: en\r\n" .
"User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.102011-10-16 20:23:10\r\n" // i.e. An iPad
)
);
$context = stream_context_create($options);
$content = file_get_contents("http://westwood-backup.com/podcast?categoryID2=403", false, $context);
echo $content;