PHP Cookbook

11.3. Fetching a URL with Cookies

Problem

You want to retrieve a page that requires a cookie to be sent with the request for the page.

Solution

Use the cURL extension and the CURLOPT_COOKIE option:

$c = curl_init('http://www.example.com/needs-cookies.php');
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_COOKIE, 'user=ellen; activity=swimming');
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$page = curl_exec($c);
curl_close($c);

If cURL isn’t available, use the addHeader( ) method in the PEAR HTTP_Request class:

require 'HTTP/Request.php';

$r = new HTTP_Request('http://www.example.com/needs-cookies.php');
$r->addHeader('Cookie','user=ellen; activity=swimming');
$r->sendRequest();
$page = $r->getResponseBody();

Discussion

Cookies are sent to the server in the Cookie request header. The cURL extension has a cookie-specific option, but with HTTP_Request, you have to add the Cookie header just as with other request headers. Multiple cookie values are sent in a semicolon-delimited list. The examples in the Solution send two cookies: one named user with value ellen and one named activity with value swimming.

To request a page that sets cookies and then make subsequent requests that include those newly set cookies, use cURL’s “cookie jar” feature. On the first request, set CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR to the name of a file to store the cookies in. On subsequent requests, set CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE to the same filename, and cURL reads the cookies from the file and sends them along with the ...