Question

I’ve got a PHP application which needs to grab the contents from another web page, and the web page I’m reading needs a cookie.

I’ve found info on how to make this call once i have the cookie ( http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.php/msg/4f618114ab15ae2a ), however I’ve no idea how to generate the cookie, or how / where the cookie is saved.

For example, to read this web page via wget I do the following:

wget --quiet --save-cookies cookie.file --output-document=who.cares \    http://remoteServer/login.php?user=xxx&pass=yyy  wget --quiet --load-cookies cookie.file --output-document=documentiwant.html \   http://remoteServer/pageicareabout.html 

… my question is how do I do the ‘–save-cookies’ bit in PHP so that I can use the cookie in the follow-up PHP stream_context_create / file_get_contents block:

$opts = array(http'=> array(   'method'=> 'GET',   'header'=>     'Accept-language: en\r\n' .     'Cookie: **NoClueAtAll**\r\n'   ) );  $context = stream_context_create($opts); $documentiwant = file_get_contents('http://remoteServer/pageicareabout.html',   0, $context); 

Answer 1

You’d probably be better off using cURL. Use curl_setopt to set up the cookie handling options.

If this is just a one-off thing, you could use Firefox with Live HTTP Headers to get the header, then paste it into your PHP code.