[php] How to send a GET request from PHP?

I'm planning to use PHP for a simple requirement. I need to download a XML content from a URL, for which I need to send HTTP GET request to that URL.

How do I do it in PHP?

For more advanced GET/POST requests, you can install the CURL library (http://us3.php.net/curl):

$ch = curl_init("REMOTE XML FILE URL GOES HERE"); // such as http://example.com/example.xml
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

I like using fsockopen open for this.

Depending on whether your php setup allows fopen on URLs, you could also simply fopen the url with the get arguments in the string (such as http://example.com?variable=value )

Edit: Re-reading the question I'm not certain whether you're looking to pass variables or not - if you're not you can simply send the fopen request containg http://example.com/filename.xml - feel free to ignore the variable=value part

Guzzle is a very well known library which makes it extremely easy to do all sorts of HTTP calls. See https://github.com/guzzle/guzzle. Install with composer require guzzlehttp/guzzle and run composer install. Now code below is enough for a http get call.

$client = new \GuzzleHttp\Client();
$response = $client->get('https://example.com/path/to/resource');

echo $response->getStatusCode();
echo $response->getBody();

http_get should do the trick. The advantages of http_get over file_get_contents include the ability to view HTTP headers, access request details, and control the connection timeout.

$response = http_get("http://www.example.com/file.xml");

In the other hand, using REST API of other servers are very popular in PHP. Suppose you are looking for a way to redirect some HTTP requests into the other server (for example getting an xml file). Here is a PHP package to help you:

https://github.com/romanpitak/PHP-REST-Client

So, getting the xml file:

$client = new Client('http://example.com');
$request = $client->newRequest('/filename.xml');
$response = $request->getResponse();
echo $response->getParsedResponse();

Remember that if you are using a proxy you need to do a little trick in your php code:

(PROXY WITHOUT AUTENTICATION EXAMPLE)

<?php
$aContext = array(
    'http' => array(
        'proxy' => 'proxy:8080',
        'request_fulluri' => true,
    ),
);
$cxContext = stream_context_create($aContext);

$sFile = file_get_contents("http://www.google.com", False, $cxContext);

echo $sFile;
?>