PHP Get Contents of a URL or Page

I am trying to create a PHP script which can request data, such as HTML content, from an external server, then do something with the received content. Here is a generalized example of what I am trying to accomplish:

//Get the HTML generated by http://api.somesite.com/

//Now tack on the Unix timestamp of when the data was received
$myFetchedData = $dataFromExternalServer . "\n Data received at: ". time();

echo $myFetchedData;

I'm thinking I should use curl in here somewhere, but I am not sure after that. Could someone post a generalized example of how I 开发者_开发知识库could do this?

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If you only need GET and allow_url_fopen is enabled on your server, you can simply use

$data = file_get_contents('http://api.somesite.com');

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This is how you would use cURL to get contents from a remote url. You would define the function and make calls like url_get_contents("http://example.com/");

function url_get_contents($url, $useragent='cURL', $headers=false, $follow_redirects=true, $debug=false) {

    // initialise the CURL library
    $ch = curl_init();

    // specify the URL to be retrieved
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);

    // we want to get the contents of the URL and store it in a variable
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);

    // specify the useragent: this is a required courtesy to site owners
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $useragent);

    // ignore SSL errors
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);

    // return headers as requested
    if ($headers==true){
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER,1);
    }

    // only return headers
    if ($headers=='headers only') {
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY ,1);
    }

    // follow redirects - note this is disabled by default in most PHP installs from 4.4.4 up
    if ($follow_redirects==true) {
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1); 
    }

    // if debugging, return an array with CURL's debug info and the URL contents
    if ($debug==true) {
        $result['contents']=curl_exec($ch);
        $result['info']=curl_getinfo($ch);
    }

    // otherwise just return the contents as a variable
    else $result=curl_exec($ch);

    // free resources
    curl_close($ch);

    // send back the data
    return $result;
}

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$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.url.com/cakephp/controller/action/param:1" ); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 ); 
$dataFromExternalServer=curl_exec($ch); 

See also: http://php.net/manual/en/function.curl-exec.php

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simple methods

<?php
echo readfile("http://example.com/");   //needs "Allow_url_include" enabled
//OR
echo include("http://example.com/");    //needs "Allow_url_include" enabled
//OR
echo file_get_contents("http://example.com/");
//OR
echo stream_get_contents(fopen('http://example.com/', "rb")); //you may use "r" instead of "rb"  //needs "Allow_url_fopen" enabled
?> 

The best Way (using cURL):

echo get_remote_data('http://example.com');   //SIMPLE REQUEST;
//OR
echo get_remote_data('http://example.com', "var2=something&var3=blabla" ); //POST REQUEST;

(CODE: at GitHub )

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Put simply:

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://api.somesite.com/');
$dataFromExternalServer = curl_exec($ch);

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If your PHP installation doesn't support curl and does not allow_url_fopen, here's an option if you have PECL:

$body = http_parse_message(http_get($url))->body;