PHP Cookbook

11.1. Fetching a URL with the GET Method

Problem

You want to retrieve the contents of a URL. For example, you want to include part of one web page in another page’s content.

Solution

Pass the URL to fopen( ) and get the contents of the page with fread( ):

$page = '';
$fh = fopen('http://www.example.com/robots.txt','r') or die($php_errormsg);
while (! feof($fh)) {
    $page .= fread($fh,1048576);
}
fclose($fh);

You can use the cURL extension:

$c = curl_init('http://www.example.com/robots.txt');
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$page = curl_exec($c);
curl_close($c);

You can also use the HTTP_Request class from PEAR:

require 'HTTP/Request.php';

$r = new HTTP_Request('http://www.example.com/robots.txt');
$r->sendRequest();
$page = $r->getResponseBody();

Discussion

You can put a username and password in the URL if you need to retrieve a protected page. In this example, the username is david, and the password is hax0r. Here’s how to do it with fopen( ) :

$fh = fopen('http://david:[e-mail]/secrets.html','r') 
    or die($php_errormsg);
while (! feof($fh)) {
    $page .= fread($fh,1048576);
}
fclose($fh);

Here’s how to do it with cURL:

$c = curl_init('http://www.example.com/secrets.html');
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_USERPWD, 'david:hax0r');
$page = curl_exec($c);
curl_close($c);

Here’s how to do it with HTTP_Request :

$r = new HTTP_Request('http://www.example.com/secrets.html'); $r->setBasicAuth('david','hax0r'); $r->sendRequest(); $page ...