Question

I have a text file filled with a list of IDs.
Using PHP, I am trying to load a url for each of the IDs and pull something from that page (another id)

For example, if I have the IDs 555, 888, 222
I want to load the URLs

http://example.edu/bvl.P_Sel?facultyID=555

http://example.edu/bvl.P_Sel?facultyID=888

http://example.edu/bvl.P_Sel?facultyID=222

I tried to get the content via
file_get_contents("http://example.edu/bvl.P_Sel?facultyID=$lines[0]");

where $lines is an array of the IDs.
This returns the following error:

Warning: file_get_contents(http://example.edu/bvl.P_Sel?facultyID=222)    [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 404 

That url is an example, but the url in the error does work when I visit it manually. And if I replace the file_get_contents variable with an actual ID, like ?facultyID=222, it works perfectly.

I visited this question’s answer How to post data in PHP using file_get_contents? and tried assigning a variable in the $postdata array to a variable, and I get the same exact error only with ?facultyID=XXX removed from the error message’s url.

My implementation of the latter is here.

Answer 1

Those encoded characters when you use the urlencode function (%0D%0A) are a new line, so maybe you array of id’s have them in each element. Try this:

// your code to generate the lines array
file_get_contents("http://example.edu/bvl.P_Sel?facultyID=" . trim($lines[0]));