Question

Alright, for a project, there’s an XML page, which uses the user’s cookies to generate output.

I don’t have access to this page, but wish to extract information from it using PHP.

My thoughts so far were some sort of PHP include that sets cookies to the externally included file.

Any pointers or suggestions would be great. Thanks.

EDIT: I have no control over the domain that the XML page is hosted on.

Answer 1

You could use cURL and include a cookie jar:

From http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/php/examples/cookiejar.html:

<?php
/*
This script is an example of using curl in php to log into on one page and 
then get another page passing all cookies from the first page along with you.
If this script was a bit more advanced it might trick the server into 
thinking its netscape and even pass a fake referer, yo look like it surfed 
from a local page.
*/

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "/tmp/cookieFileName");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,"http://www.myterminal.com/checkpwd.asp");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "UserID=username&password=passwd");

ob_start();      // prevent any output
curl_exec ($ch); // execute the curl command
ob_end_clean();  // stop preventing output

curl_close ($ch);
unset($ch);

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "/tmp/cookieFileName");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,"http://www.myterminal.com/list.asp");

$buf2 = curl_exec ($ch);

curl_close ($ch);

echo "<PRE>".htmlentities($buf2);
?>