Question

I am using yahoo’s finance stock quotes to get the stock ticker data from their api .
To grab the data using

$data = file_get_contents("http://quote.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=appl&f=sl1d1t1c1ohgv&e=.csv"); 
$values = explode(",", $data);
echo '<pre>';
print_r($values);    

Now this works perfectly fine in my local server (localhost) , i.e $values are echoed out .
But when i upload this file onto my server ,it prints out the URL : http://quote.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=appl&f=sl1d1t1c1ohgv&e=.csv . I know there is some issue with the file_get_contents on the server . Even allow_url_fopen is set to ‘ON’ on the server .Just cant seem to figure out the issue on the server end .

Answer 1

You probably are having problems with server settings not letting you use file_get_contents(). In PHP curl will be your friend when trying to pull in content from other domains.

I just found this awesome little snippet: http://snipplr.com/view/4084

It’s a function to replicate the functionality of file_get_contents() but uses curl:

function file_get_contents_curl($url) {
    $ch = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); //Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);

    $data = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);

    return $data;
}

Your new code would look like this:

$data = file_get_contents_curl("http://quote.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=appl&f=sl1d1t1c1ohgv&e=.csv"); 
$values = explode(",", $data);
echo '<pre>';
print_r($values);