From within the HTML code in one of my server pages I need to address a search of a specific item on a database placed in another remote server that I don’t own myself.
Example of the search type that performs my request: http://www.remoteserver.com/items/search.php?search_size=XXL
The remote server provides to me - as client - the response displaying a page with several items that match my search criteria.
I don’t want to have this page displayed. What I want is to collect into a string (or local file) the full contents of the remote server HTML response (the code we have access when we click on ‘View Source’ in my IE browser client).
If I collect that data (it could easily reach reach 50000 bytes) I can then filter the one in which I am interested (substrings) and assemble a new request to the remote server for only one of the specific items in the response provided.
Is there any way through which I can get HTML from the response provided by the remote server with Javascript or PHP, and also avoid the display of the response in the browser itself?
I hope I have not confused your minds …
Thanks for any help you may provide.
As #mario mentioned, there are several different ways to do it.
Using file_get_contents():
$txt = file_get_contents('http://www.example.com/');
echo $txt;
Using php's curl functions:
$url = 'http://www.mysite.com';
$ch = curl_init($url);
// Tell curl_exec to return the text instead of sending it to STDOUT
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
// Don't include return header in output
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
$txt = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $txt;
curl is probably the most robust option because you have options for more control over the exact request parameters and possibilities for error handling when things don't go as planned
Related
Yeah, I'm stumped. I'm getting nothing. curl_exec is returning no content. I've tried file_get_contents, but that completely times out. I'm attempting to get an API XML from my Subsonic media server and display it on my web server (different servers). The end result would be that I can have people log in to my web server with the media server account. I can deal with the actual parsing later, but I can't even grab the XML right now. I've tried their forums, but haven't gotten much help since they're not really PHP inclined. Figure I'd ask here.
$url = "http://{$subserver}/rest/getUser.view?u={$username}&p={$password}&username={$username}&v=1.8.0&c={$appID}";
$c = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
$result = curl_exec($c);
curl_close($c);
echo $result;
This returns nothing. The variables are defined correctly, and I get the same response as if I typed in the whole URL. Here is their API page: http://www.subsonic.org/pages/api.jsp I've even tried with their "ping" function - still empty
The url itself looks fine. In the web browser, it returns:
This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
<subsonic-response xmlns="http://subsonic.org/restapi" status="ok" version="1.8.0">
<user username="xxxxxx" email="xxxxxx#xxxxxx.com" scrobblingEnabled="false" adminRole="true" settingsRole="true" downloadRole="true" uploadRole="true" playlistRole="true" coverArtRole="true" commentRole="true" podcastRole="true" streamRole="true" jukeboxRole="true" shareRole="true"/>
</subsonic-response>
I admit I've never used XML, but according to everything I've read... this should work. And it does work, with other random XML files I found on the web.
it might have something to do with the fact that it's not an ".xml" file, but a generated via url xml, as this same exact code will work with some random xml file I found ( http://www.w3schools.com/xml/note.xml )
Any thoughts?
I'm not very expert to PHP. I want to know how to communicate between 2 web servers. For clearance, (from 1st Server) run a function (querying) on remote server. And return the result to 1st server.
Actually the theme will be:
Web Server (1) ----------------> Web Server (2) ---------------> Database Server
Web Server (1) <---------------- Web Server (2) <--------------- Database Server
Query Function() will be only located on Web Server (2). Then i need to run that query function() remotely from Web Server (1).
What is it call? And Is it possible?
Yes.
A nice way I can think of doing would be to send a request to the 2nd server via a URL. In the GET (or POST) parameters, specify which method you'd like to call, and (for security) some sort of hash that changes with time. The hash in there to ensure no third-party can run the function arbitrarily on the 2nd server.
To send the request, you could use cURL:
function get_url($request_url) {
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $request_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 10);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $response;
}
This sends a GET request. You can then use:
$request_url = 'http://second-server-address/listening_page.php?function=somefunction&securityhash=HASH';
$response = get_url($request_url);
On your second server, set up the listening_page.php (with whatever filename you like, of course) that checks for GET requests and verifies the integrity of the request (i.e. the hash, correct & valid params).
You can do so by using an API. create a page on second server that takes variables and communicates to the server using those vars (depending on what you need). and the standard reply from that page should be either JSON or XML. then read that from server 1 by requesting that file and getting the reply from the 2nd server.
*NOTE if its a private file, make sure you use an authentication method to prevent users from accessing the file
What you are aiming to do is definitely possible. You will need to set up some sort of api in order for server one to make a request to server 2.
I suggest you read up on SOAP and REST api
http://www.netmagazine.com/tutorials/make-your-own-soap-api
Generally you will use something like CURL to contact server 2 from server 1.
Google curl and you should quickly get idea.
Its not going to be easy to give you a complete solution so I hope this nudge in the right direction is helpful.
I am a green programmer and I was originally trying to make cross domain requests in JS. I quickly learned that this is not allowed. Unlike similar questions posted on here, I would like to see if I can use PHP to make them for me instead of JSONP requests. Is this possible?
Simple workflow...
BROWSER: POST to my PHP the request-payload & request-headers
PHP: POST to Other Domain's URL the request-payload & request-headers
Other Domain: Process Request and send response
PHP: Send the Response-Content and Response-Header Info back to the browser
Here is what I am trying to work with http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb969500%28v=office.12%29.aspx
My goal is to make a Communicator Web Access Client that is web based and mobile friendly.
A link to a working example would be awesome!
CURL yould be your option in this case, something simple as:
<?php
$ch = curl_init('http://otherdomain.com/');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
var_dump($result);
?>
In this case, $result would contain the html code of the site. Please be aware that it doesn't going to execute any javascript as if you were visiting the site on the browser.
You are talking about web services and seems that the goal is process payments. Any major payment gateway have APIs prepared for that. In any case you can study by your own. Here a good starting point http://ajaxonomy.com/2008/xml/web-services-part-1-soap-vs-rest
I've got a simple php script to ping some of my domains using file_get_contents(), however I have checked my logs and they are not recording any get requests.
I have
$result = file_get_contents($url);
echo $url. ' pinged ok\n';
where $url for each of the domains is just a simple string of the form http://mydomain.com/, echo verifies this. Manual requests made by myself are showing.
Why would the get requests not be showing in my logs?
Actually I've got it to register the hit when I send $result to the browser. I guess this means the webserver only records browser requests? Is there any way to mimic such in php?
ok tried curl php:
// create curl resource
$ch = curl_init();
// set url
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "getcorporate.co.nr");
//return the transfer as a string
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
// $output contains the output string
$output = curl_exec($ch);
// close curl resource to free up system resources
curl_close($ch);
same effect though - no hit registered in logs. So far it only registers when I feed the http response back from my script to the browser. Obviously this will only work for a single request and not a bunch as is the purpose of my script.
If something else is going wrong, what debugging output can I look at?
Edit: D'oh! See comments below accepted answer for explanation of my erroneous thinking.
If the request is actually being made, it would be in the logs.
Your example code could be failing silently.
What happens if you do:
<?PHP
if ($result = file_get_contents($url)){
echo "Success";
}else{
echo "Epic Fail!";
}
If that's failing, you'll want to turn on some error reporting or logging and try to figure out why.
Note: if you're in safe mode, or otherwise have fopen url wrappers disabled, file_get_contents() will not grab a remote page. This is the most likely reason things would be failing (assuming there's not a typo in the contents of $url).
Use curl instead?
That's odd. Maybe there is some caching afoot? Have you tried changing the URL dynamically ($url = $url."?timestamp=".time() for example)?
I have a form on my site which sends data to some remote site - simple html form.
What I want to do is to use data user enters into form for statistical purposes.
So I instead of sending data to the remote page I send it first to my script which resends it the remote site.
The thing is I need it to behave in exact way the usual form would behave taking user to the remote site and displaying resources.
When I use this code it kinda works but not in the way I want it to:
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $action);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $fields);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
Problem is that it displays response in the same script. For example if $action is for example:
somesite.com/processform.php and my script name is mysqcript.php it would display the response of "somesite.com/processform.php" inside "mysqcript.php" so all the relative links are not working.
How do I make it to send the user to "somesite.com/processform.php"? Same thing that pressing the button would do?
Leonti
I think you will have to do this on your end, as translating relative paths is the client's job. It should be simple: Just take the base directory of the request you made
http://otherdomain.com/my/request/path.php
and add it in front of every outgoing link that does not begin with "/" or a protocol ("http://", "ftp://").
Detecting all the outgoing links is hard, but I am 100% sure there are ready-made PHP classes that do that. Check for example this article and the getLinks() function in the user comments. I am not 100% sure whether this is what you need but it certainly goes to the right direction.
Here are a couple of possible solutions, which I post separately so they don't get mixed up with the one I recommend:
1 - keep using cURL, parse the response and add a <base/> tag to it. It should work for pretty much everything on that page.
<base href="http://realsite.com/form_url.php" />
2 - do not alter the submit URL. Submit the form to the real URL, but capture its content using some Javascript library (YUI does that) and send it to your script via XHR. It's still kind of hacky though.
There are several ways to do that. Here's one of the easiest: just use a 307 redirect.
header('Location: http://realsite.com/form_url.php', true, 307');
You can do your logging and stuff either before or after header() but if you do it after calling header() you will need to start your script with
ignore_user_abort(true);
Note that browsers are supposed to notify the user that their form is being redirected.