[php] PHP file_get_contents() and setting request headers

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?

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.

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:

<?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);
?>

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)

Here is what worked for me (Dominic was just one line short).

$url = "";

$options = array(
  'http'=>array(
    'method'=>"GET",
    'header'=>"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);

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]=>
  string(15) "HTTP/1.1 200 OK"
  [1]=>
  string(35) "Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2008 17:30:38 GMT"
  [2]=>
  string(29) "Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)"
  [3]=>
  string(44) "Last-Modified: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 13:24:10 GMT"
  [4]=>
  string(27) "ETag: "280100-1b6-80bfd280""
  [5]=>
  string(20) "Accept-Ranges: bytes"
  [6]=>
  string(19) "Content-Length: 438"
  [7]=>
  string(17) "Connection: close"
  [8]=>
  string(38) "Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8"
}

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