Question

I am experiencing some very strange behavior when including a php file.
I need to load a script that is not on the same domain as the page that will be calling it.

I have already created a system that works using cURL, but I just recently found out that many of the sites that will need to have access to this script, do not have cURL installed.
I did, however, notice that these sites have allow_url_fopen set to on. With this knowledge I got started creating a new system that would let me just include the script on the remote site.

Just testing this out, I coded the script test.php as follows:

<?php 
echo("test");
?>

I include this script on the remote page using:

<?php
include("http://mydomain.com/script.php");
?>

and it works no problem and “test” is printed at the top of the page.

However, if I add a function to the script and try to call the function from the page, it crashes.
To make it worse, this site has php errors turned off and I have no way of turning it on.

To fully make sure that I didn’t just mess up the code, I made my test.php look like this:

<?php
function myfunc()
{
return "abc";
}
?>

Then on the page including the file:

<?php 
include("http://mydomain.com/script.php");
echo(myfunc());
?>

And it crashes.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

This is not odd behavior, but since you load the file over the internet (note in this case the World Wide Web), the file is interpreted before it is sent to your include function.

Since the script is interpreted no functions will be visible, but only the output of the script.

Either load it over FTP or create an API for the functions.