Question

I want to download a page from the web, it’s allowed to do when you are using a simple browser like Firefox, but when I use ‘file_get_contents’ the server refuses and replies that it understands the command but don’t allow such downloads.

So what to do? I think I saw in some scripts (on Perl) a way to make your script like a real browser by creating a user agent and cookies, which makes the servers think that your script is a real web browser.

Does anyone have an idea about this, how it can be done?

Answer 1

Use CURL.

<?php         // create curl resource         $ch = curl_init();          // set url         curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'example.com');          //return the transfer as a string         curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);           // set the UA         curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'My App (http://www.example.com/)');          // Alternatively, lie, and pretend to be a browser         // curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)');          // $output contains the output string         $output = curl_exec($ch);          // close curl resource to free up system resources         curl_close($ch);      ?> 

(From http://uk.php.net/manual/en/curl.examples-basic.php)