Question

I need to read a file on a foreign server.

Apart from cURL and file_get_contents() are there any other ways to read the file using PHP?

This needs to be deployed on a variety of servers and some servers we are deploying to are really cheap shared hosts. These often have configurations that disable either or both of these methods.

The file I need to get is an XML file if that makes any difference.

Answer 1

If the target is an XML file, you could try using PHP’s DOM implementation. For example:

<?php
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->load('http://www.w3schools.com/xml/guestbook.asp');
header("Content-type: text/xml");
echo $doc->saveXML();
?>