Question

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.

Answer 1

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