how to get the cookies from a php curl into a variable

Question

So some guy at some other company thought it would be awesome if instead of using soap or xml-rpc or rest or any other reasonable communication protocol he just embedded all of his response as cookies in the header   I need to pull these cookies out as hopefully an array from this curl response   If I have to waste a bunch of my life writing a parser for this I will be very unhappy   Does anyone know how this can simply be done  preferably without writing anything to a file   I will be very grateful if anyone can help me out with this

User · Answer

This does it without regexps  but requires the PECL HTTP extension   curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT RETURNTRANSFER  1   curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT HEADER  1    result   curl exec  ch   curl close  ch     headers   http parse headers  result    cookobjs   Array    foreach  headers AS  k   gt   v       if  strtolower  k    set-cookie            foreach  v AS  k2   gt   v2                cookobjs     http parse cookie  v2                       cookies   Array    foreach  cookobjs AS  row        cookies      row- gt cookies      tmp   Array       sort k  gt v format foreach  cookies AS  v       foreach   v  AS  k1   gt   v1            tmp  k1   v1            cookies    tmp  print r  cookies

User · Answer

Although this question is quite old  and the accepted response is valid  I find it a bit unconfortable because the content of the HTTP response  HTML  XML  JSON  binary or whatever  becomes mixed with the headers   I ve found a different alternative  CURL provides an option  CURLOPT HEADERFUNCTION  to set a callback that will be called for each response header line  The function will receive the curl object and a string with the header line   You can use a code like this  adapted from TML response     cookies   Array     ch   curl init  http   www google com        Ask for the callback  curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT HEADERFUNCTION   curlResponseHeaderCallback     result   curl exec  ch   var dump  cookies    function curlResponseHeaderCallback  ch   headerLine        global  cookies      if  preg match    Set-Cookie  s         mi    headerLine   cookie     1           cookies      cookie      return strlen  headerLine      Needed by curl     This solution has the drawback of using a global variable  but I guess this is not an issue for short scripts  And you can always use static methods and attributes if curl is being wrapped into a class

User · Answer

My understanding is that cookies from curl must be written out to a file  curl -c cookie file   If you re running curl through PHP s exec or system functions  or anything in that family   you should be able to save the cookies to a file  then open the file and read them in

User · Answer

ch   curl init  http   www google com     curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT RETURNTRANSFER  1      get headers too with this line curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT HEADER  1    result   curl exec  ch      get cookie    multi-cookie variant contributed by  Combuster in comments preg match all    Set-Cookie  s         mi    result   matches    cookies   array    foreach  matches 1  as  item        parse str  item   cookie        cookies   array merge  cookies   cookie     var dump  cookies

User · Answer

The accepted answer seems like it will search through the entire response message  This could give you false matches for cookie headers if the word  Set-Cookie  is at the beginning of a line  While it should be fine in most cases  The safer way might be to read through the message from the beginning until the first empty line which indicates the end of the message headers  This is just an alternate solution that should look for the first blank line and then use preg grep on those lines only to find  Set-Cookie        curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT HEADER  1         Return everything      res   curl exec  ch         Split into lines      lines   explode   n    res        headers   array         body           foreach  lines as  num   gt   line            l   str replace   r        line             Empty line indicates the start of the message body and end of headers         if trim  l                       headers   array slice  lines  0   num                body    lines  num   1                 Pull only cookies out of the headers              cookies   preg grep    Set-Cookie      headers               break

User · Answer

someone here may find it useful  hhb curl exec2 works pretty much like curl exec  but arg3 is an array which will be populated with the returned http headers  numeric index   and arg4 is an array which will be populated with the returned cookies   cookies  expires     Fri  06-May-2016 05 58 51 GMT    and arg5 will be populated with    info about the raw request made by curl   the downside is that it requires CURLOPT RETURNTRANSFER  to be on  else it error out  and that it will overwrite CURLOPT STDERR and CURLOPT VERBOSE  if you were already using them for something else    i might fix this later   example of how to use it     lt  php header  content-type  text plain charset utf8     ch curl init     headers array     cookies array     debuginfo      body     curl setopt  ch CURLOPT SSL VERIFYPEER false   curl setopt  ch CURLOPT RETURNTRANSFER true    body hhb curl exec2  ch  https   www youtube com    headers  cookies  debuginfo   var dump   cookies    cookies   headers    headers   debuginfo    debuginfo   body    body     and the function itself    function hhb curl exec2  ch   url   amp  returnHeaders   array     amp  returnCookies   array     amp  verboseDebugInfo              returnHeaders      array         returnCookies      array         verboseDebugInfo           if   is resource  ch     get resource type  ch       curl             throw new InvalidArgumentException   ch must be a curl handle               if   is string  url             throw new InvalidArgumentException   url must be a string                verbosefileh   tmpfile         verbosefile    stream get meta data  verbosefileh        verbosefile     verbosefile  uri        curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT VERBOSE  1       curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT STDERR   verbosefileh       curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT HEADER  1        html               hhb curl exec  ch   url        verboseDebugInfo   file get contents  verbosefile       curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT STDERR  NULL       fclose  verbosefileh       unset  verbosefile   verbosefileh        headers         array         crlf              x0d x0a        thepos          strpos  html   crlf    crlf  0        headersString   substr  html  0   thepos        headerArr       explode  crlf   headersString        returnHeaders    headerArr      unset  headersString   headerArr        htmlBody   substr  html   thepos   4     should work on utf8 ascii headers    utf32  not so sure       unset  html         I REALLY HOPE THERE EXIST A BETTER WAY TO GET COOKIES   good grief this looks ugly         at least it s tested and seems to work perfectly         grabCookieName   function  str                 ret                i     0          for   i   0   i  lt  strlen  str      i                if   str  i                             continue                            if   str  i                             break                             ret     str  i                     return urldecode  ret              foreach   returnHeaders as  header              Set-Cookie  crlfcoookielol crlf is 0D 0A and newline is  0D 0A and semicolon is 3B and not sure what else           Set-Cookie ci spill a 3A4 3A 7Bs 3A10 3A 22session id 22 3Bs 3A32 3A 22305d3d67b8016ca9661c3b032d4319df 22 3Bs 3A10 3A 22ip address 22 3Bs 3A14 3A 2285 164 158 128 22 3Bs 3A10 3A 22user agent 22 3Bs 3A109 3A 22Mozilla 2F5 0  28Windows NT 6 1 3B WOW64 29 AppleWebKit 2F537 36  28KHTML 2C like Gecko 29 Chrome 2F43 0 2357 132 Safari 2F537 36 22 3Bs 3A13 3A 22last activity 22 3Bi 3A1436874639 3B 7Dcab1dd09f4eca466660e8a767856d013  expires Tue  14-Jul-2015 13 50 39 GMT  path           Set-Cookie  sessionToken abc123  Expires Wed  09 Jun 2021 10 18 14 GMT            Cookie names cannot contain any of the following       t r n 013 014                                if  stripos  header   Set-Cookie        0                continue                                      header   trim substr  header  strlen  Set-Cookie               while  strlen  header   gt  0                 cookiename                    grabCookieName  header                returnCookies  cookiename                     header                       substr  header  strlen  cookiename    1     also remove the                if  strlen  header   lt  1                    break                                           thepos   strpos  header                    if   thepos     false      last cookie in this Set-Cookie                   returnCookies  cookiename    urldecode  header                   break                             returnCookies  cookiename    urldecode substr  header  0   thepos                 header                       trim substr  header   thepos   1      also remove the                       unset  header   cookiename   thepos       return  htmlBody     function hhb curl exec  ch   url        static  hhb curl domainCache              hhb curl domainCache  amp  this- gt hhb curl domainCache         ch  amp  this- gt curlh      if   is resource  ch     get resource type  ch       curl             throw new InvalidArgumentException   ch must be a curl handle               if   is string  url             throw new InvalidArgumentException   url must be a string                 tmpvar           if  parse url  url  PHP URL HOST      null            if  substr  url  0  1                          url    hhb curl domainCache          url            else                url    hhb curl domainCache    url                             curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT URL   url        html   curl exec  ch       if  curl errno  ch             throw new Exception  Curl error  curl errno     curl errno  ch       on url     var export  url  true           curl error  ch               echo  Curl error      curl error  ch             if   html         amp  amp  203      tmpvar   curl getinfo  ch  CURLINFO HTTP CODE     203 is  success  but no output                  throw new Exception  Curl returned nothing for     var export  url  true      but HTTP RESPONSE CODE was     var export  tmpvar  true                      remember that curl  usually  auto-follows the  Location    http redirects        hhb curl domainCache   parse url curl getinfo  ch  CURLINFO EFFECTIVE URL   PHP URL HOST       return  html

User · Answer

If you use CURLOPT COOKIE FILE and CURLOPT COOKIE JAR curl will read write the cookies from to a file   You can  after curl is done with it  read and or modify it however you want

User · Answer

libcurl also provides CURLOPT COOKIELIST which extracts all known cookies  All you need is to make sure the PHP CURL binding can use it

[php] how to get the cookies from a php curl into a variable

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