file_get_contents and CURL can't open a specific website - php

Question

I tried to use file_get_contents and cURL to get the content of an website, I also tried to open the same site using Lynx and could not get the content. I got a 406 Not Acceptable, it seems that the site checks if I'm using a browser. Is there a work around?

Answer 1

It probably expects the user agent to be a web browser. You can set this easily using cURL:
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $useragent);
Where $useragent is the string you want to use for a user agent. Try it with some common ones for the major browsers and see if that helps. This page lists some common user agents.

Answer 2

//make a call the the webpage to get his handicap
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.golfspain.com/portalgolf/HCP/handicap_resul.aspx?sLic=CB00693474");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 60);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://google.com" );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, TRUE );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13');
$header = array(
'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
'Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7',
'Accept-Language: en-us;q=0.8,en;q=0.6'
);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $header);
$html = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->strictErrorChecking = FALSE;
$doc->loadHTML($html);
$xml = simplexml_import_dom($doc);

Answer 3

Maybe you have to set some more HTTP headers like a 'real' browser. With cURL:
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13');
$header = array(
'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
'Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7',
'Accept-Language: en-us;q=0.8,en;q=0.6'
);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $header);