Question

Hi I have a link that is download a CSV file, I would like to use the data inside to build my website, but I don’t wont to download the file, is there anyway to do it?
the link is: http://www.nasdaq.com/screening/companies-by-name.aspx?letter=0&exchange=nasdaq&render=download

Answer 1

Use fopen() or PHP cURL library:

fopen() (Usually this is not as safe as cURL, and you might run into issues when fopen is not allowed in the PHP settings file, but it is a quick and dirty way to do it):

// Load file into resource from URL.
$fileHandle = fopen("http://www.nasdaq.com/screening/companies-by-name.aspx?letter=0&exchange=nasdaq&render=download", "r");
// Edit: Load file resource into string.
$fileContents = fread($fileHandle);
echo $fileContents;

cURL (The preferred way. Read up on cURL here: http://php.net/manual/en/book.curl.php):

$curl = curl_init(); // Open a cURL library resource.

// Set the resource option for the URL.
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.nasdaq.com/screening/companies-by-name.aspx?letter=0&exchange=nasdaq&render=download");
// Set the resource option to let it return a value from the execution function.
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

$file = curl_exec($curl); // Execute cURL, load the result into variable $file.
curl_close($curl); // Close the cURL resource.

print_r($file); // The file should now be a string, exactly the CSV string that was scraped.