Question

Using php I am trying to get some data from a .csv file which is stored online (www.website.com/data/my_file.csv). While testing the code on localhost (using xampp) everything works great, but when I moved my files to my online server it doesn’t work.
What i am doing is:

$filesize=2000;
$handle = fopen("www.website.com/data/my_file.csv", "r") or die ('cannot open the file');
$raw = fread($handle, $filesize);
fclose($handle);

this will give me ‘cannot open the file‘. If I try the same code from localhost, it works.
Furthermore, I tried this other way:

$filesize=2000;
$handle = fopen("my_file.csv", "r") or die ('cannot open the file');
$raw = fread($handle, $filesize);
fclose($handle);

which actually works, but the problem is that the .csv file should be open/read from the full url.
Is there anything that I am overlooking or this is just the wrong way of doing it?

Answer 1

Are you on a shared hosting account of some sort? A lot of those places don’t allow remote calls by disabling the allow_url_fopen directive.

Try running this at the beginning of your file:

<?php
   ini_set("allow_url_fopen", 1);