Question

I need to perform a get request and send headers along with it. What can I use to do this?

The main header I need to set is the browser one. Is there an easy way to do this?

Answer 1

If you’re using cURL, you can use curl_setopt ($handle, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'browser description') to define the user-agent header of the request.

If you’re using file_get_contents, check out this tweak of an example on the man page for file_get_contents:

// Create a stream
$opts = array(
  'http'=>array(
    'method'=>"GET",
    'header'=>"Accept-language: en\r\n" .
              "Cookie: foo=bar\r\n" .
              "User-agent: BROWSER-DESCRIPTION-HERE\r\n"
  )
);

$context = stream_context_create($opts);

// Open the file using the HTTP headers set above
$file = file_get_contents('http://www.example.com/', false, $context);