Question

I am using PHP cURL to fetch XML output from a URL. Here is what my code looks like:

$ch = curl_init(); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.mydomain.com?querystring'); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "username:password");
$store = curl_exec($ch);
echo $store;
curl_close($ch);

But, instead of returning the XML it just shows my 404 error page. If I type the URL http://www.mydomain.com?querystring in the web browser I can see the XML in the browser.

What am I missing here? 🙁

Thanks.

Answer 1

Some website owners check for the existence of certain things to make sure the request comes from a web browser and not a bot (or cURL). You should try adding curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0)'); and see if that fixes the problem. That will send a user-agent string. The site may also check for the existence of cookies or other things.

To output the XML in a web-page, you’ll need to use htmlentities(). You might want to wrap it inside a HTML <pre> element as well.