How to use PHP to get a webpage into a variable - php

Question

I want to download a page from the web, it's allowed to do when you are using a simple browser like Firefox, but when I use "file_get_contents" the server refuses and replies that it understands the command but don't allow such downloads.
So what to do? I think I saw in some scripts (on Perl) a way to make your script like a real browser by creating a user agent and cookies, which makes the servers think that your script is a real web browser.
Does anyone have an idea about this, how it can be done?

Answer 1

Use CURL.
<?php
// create curl resource
$ch = curl_init();
// set url
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "example.com");
//return the transfer as a string
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
// set the UA
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'My App (http://www.example.com/)');
// Alternatively, lie, and pretend to be a browser
// curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)');
// $output contains the output string
$output = curl_exec($ch);
// close curl resource to free up system resources
curl_close($ch);
?>
(From http://uk.php.net/manual/en/curl.examples-basic.php)

Answer 2

Yeah, CUrl is pretty good in getting page content. I use it with classes like DOMDocument and DOMXPath to grind the content to a usable form.
function __construct($useragent,$url)
{
$this->useragent='Firefox (WindowsXP) - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.'.$useragent;
$this->url=$url;
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $useragent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
$html= curl_exec($ch);
$dom = new DOMDocument();
#$dom->loadHTML($html);
$this->xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
}
...
public function displayResults($site)
$data=$this->path[0]->length;
for($i=0;$i<$data;$i++)
{
$delData=$this->path[0]->item($i);
//setting the href and title properties
$urlSite=$delData->getElementsByTagName('a')->item(0)->getAttribute('href');
$titleSite=$delData->getElementsByTagName('a')->item(0)->nodeValue;
//setting the saves and additoinal
$saves=$delData->getElementsByTagName('span')->item(0)->nodeValue;
if ($saves==NULL)
{
$saves=0;
}
//build the array
$this->newSiteBookmark[$i]['source']='delicious.com';
$this->newSiteBookmark[$i]['url']=$urlSite;
$this->newSiteBookmark[$i]['title']=$titleSite;
$this->newSiteBookmark[$i]['saves']=$saves;
}
The latter is a part of a class that scrapes data from delicious.com .Not very legal though.

Answer 3

This answer takes your comment to Rich's answer in mind.
The site is probably checking whether or not you are a real user using the HTTP referer or the User Agent string. try setting these for your curl:
//pretend you came from their site already
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, 'http://domainofthesite.com');
//pretend you are firefox 3.06 running on windows Vista
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6');

Answer 4

Another way to do it (though others have pointed out a better way), is to use PHP's fopen() function, like so:
$handle = fopen("http://www.example.com/", "r");//open specified URL for reading
It's especially useful if cURL isn't available.