Question

How can I read the content of a file from a completely different server, then display the content. I will later change the code to use the returned information in th proper manner.

Answer 1

You can use file_get_contents or cURL.

Following example downloads the HTML of home page of google.com and shows it on screen.

file_get_contents way:

$data = file_get_contents("http://www.google.com/");
echo "<pre>" . $data . "</pre>";

cURL way:

function get_web_page( $url )
{
    $options = array(
        CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,     // return web page
        CURLOPT_HEADER         => false,    // don't return headers
        CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,     // follow redirects
        CURLOPT_ENCODING       => "",       // handle all encodings
        CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER    => true,     // set referer on redirect
        CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 120,      // timeout on connect
        CURLOPT_TIMEOUT        => 120,      // timeout on response
        CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS      => 10,       // stop after 10 redirects
    );

    $ch      = curl_init( $url );
    curl_setopt_array( $ch, $options );
    $content = curl_exec( $ch );
    $err     = curl_errno( $ch );
    $errmsg  = curl_error( $ch );
    $header  = curl_getinfo( $ch );
    curl_close( $ch );

    $header['errno']   = $err;
    $header['errmsg']  = $errmsg;
    $header['content'] = $content;
    return $header;
}

//Now get the webpage
$data = get_web_page( "https://www.google.com/" );

//Display the data (optional)
echo "<pre>" . $data['content'] . "</pre>";