Issues with file() and file_get_contents()

[sharpjx]

I am scratching my head at this one. I am trying to do the following:

 

$data = file('http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/printfriendly.do?assetkey=118367-04');

print_r ($data);

 

That does not work. $data is empty although I know fully well that there is a page of data on that Sun Microsystems patch. I tried using file_get_contents() to read it as a string. Same thing. The variable is empty. The only thing that 'kinda' works is

 

$data = system("curl http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/printfriendly.do?assetkey=118367-04");

 

The problem is that I want to capture the output into $data and process it as it contains some info I need, but all that system does is display the output of 'curl' without passing it on to the variable. I could output to a file and use system() to read that file, but that is not very elegant. There has to be a way to do this using file() or file_get_contents().

 

BTW, I know that file() and file_get_contents() work fine for other web pages on my system so this is not a php.ini issue. I am fairly sure that the issue is with the Sunsolve web server at the other end and how it interacts with PHP.

 

How can I verify this and how can I overcome this problem to capture the output of

 

  http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/printfriendly.do?assetkey=118367-04,

 

pass it to a variable and start searching within the output?

 

Help!

 

François

 

 

 

 

[corbin]

Sun probably doesn't like PHP pages requesting their content.  You'll either need to use cURL or sockets.

 

 

http://php.net/curl

http://php.net/fsockopen

 

 

If you go the socket route, you'll need to know some HTTP protocol stuff, but nothing that's super complex.

[sKunKbad]

you can create a stream context within file_get_contents, and add a user-agent string. That might be your easy answer. See the file_get_contents page in the docs if you haven't done this before.

[sharpjx]

Thanks for the pointers, this helped me tremendously. Here is the magic code to resolve this issue

 

  $ch = curl_init();

 

  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/3.0.10');

 

  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/printfriendly.do?assetkey=118367-04");

 

  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

 

  $output = curl_exec($ch);

 

  curl_close($ch);

 

  echo $output;

 

The magic is on line # 2 where CURLOPT_USERAGENT is set. sunsolve.sun.com seems to like this better than whatever PHP was sending before.

 

Cheers and thanks!

 

François

[thebadbad]

cURL is not required, you can set the user agent string with ini_set(), and then use one of your former methods.

 

ini_set('user_agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/3.0.10');

[sharpjx]

Yes, I just realized that by playing around a bit more. This finally works as expected:

 

  ini_set('user_agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/3.0.10');

 

  $file = file_get_contents('http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/printfriendly.do?assetkey=118367-04', false);

 

The page goes into $file and can be analyzed.

 

Thank you all.

[sKunKbad]

...sunsolve.sun.com seems to like this better than whatever PHP was sending before.

 

It's not just sun.com; many servers will reject requests if user-agent isn't set.