PHP file get contents and setting request headers

Question

With PHP  is it possible to send HTTP headers with file get contents      I know you can send the user agent from your php ini file  However  can you also send other information such as HTTP ACCEPT  HTTP ACCEPT LANGUAGE  and HTTP CONNECTION with file get contents      Or is there another function that will accomplish this

User · Answer

If you don t need HTTPS and curl is not available on your system you could use fsockopen  This function opens a connection from which you can both read and write like you would do with a normal file handle

User · Answer

Unfortunately  it doesn t look like file get contents   really offers that degree of control  The cURL extension is usually the first to come up  but I would highly recommend the PECL HTTP extension  http   pecl php net package pecl http  for very simple and straightforward HTTP requests   it s much easier to work with than cURL

User · Answer

Actually  upon further reading on the file get contents   function     Create a stream  opts          quot http quot    gt             quot method quot    gt   quot GET quot            quot header quot    gt   quot Accept-language  en r n quot                 quot Cookie  foo bar r n quot               DOCS  https   www php net manual en function stream-context-create php  context   stream context create  opts       Open the file using the HTTP headers set above    DOCS  https   www php net manual en function file-get-contents php  file   file get contents  http   www example com    false   context    You may be able to follow this pattern to achieve what you are seeking to  I haven t personally tested this though   and if it doesn t work  feel free to check out my other answer

User · Answer

You can use this variable to retrieve response headers after file get contents   function   Code     file get contents  http   example com      var dump  http response header     Output   array 9       0   gt    string 15   HTTP 1 1 200 OK     1   gt    string 35   Date  Sat  12 Apr 2008 17 30 38 GMT     2   gt    string 29   Server  Apache 2 2 3  CentOS      3   gt    string 44   Last-Modified  Tue  15 Nov 2005 13 24 10 GMT     4   gt    string 27   ETag   280100-1b6-80bfd280      5   gt    string 20   Accept-Ranges  bytes     6   gt    string 19   Content-Length  438     7   gt    string 17   Connection  close     8   gt    string 38   Content-Type  text html  charset UTF-8

User · Answer

Yes  When calling file get contents on a URL  one should use the stream create context function  which is fairly well documented on php net  This is more or less exactly covered on the following page at php net in the user comments section  http   php net manual en function stream-context-create php

User · Answer

Using the php cURL libraries will probably be the right way to go  as this library has more features than the simple file get contents        An example    lt  php  ch   curl init     headers   array  HTTP ACCEPT  Something    HTTP ACCEPT LANGUAGE  fr  en  da  nl    HTTP CONNECTION  Something     curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT URL   http   localhost      URL to post to curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT RETURNTRANSFER  1      return into a variable curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT HTTPHEADER   header      custom headers  see above  result   curl exec   ch      run  curl close  ch     gt

User · Answer

Here is what worked for me  Dominic was just one line short     url         options   array     http   gt array       method   gt  GET        header   gt  Accept-language  en r n                   Cookie  foo bar r n        check function stream-context-create on php net                User-Agent  Mozilla 5 0  iPad  U  CPU OS 3 2 like Mac OS X  en-us  AppleWebKit 531 21 10  KHTML  like Gecko  Version 4 0 4 Mobile 7B334b Safari 531 21 102011-10-16 20 23 10 r n     i e  An iPad           context   stream context create  options    file   file get contents  url  false   context

[php] PHP file_get_contents() and setting request headers

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