Save cookies for remote web pages
Question
I've got a PHP application which needs to grab the contents from another web page, and the web page I'm reading needs a cookie.
I've found info on how to make this call once i have the cookie ( http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.php/msg/4f618114ab15ae2a ), however I've no idea how to generate the cookie, or how / where the cookie is saved.
For example, to read this web page via wget I do the following:
wget --quiet --save-cookies cookie.file --output-document=who.cares \
http://remoteServer/login.php?user=xxx&pass=yyy
wget --quiet --load-cookies cookie.file --output-document=documentiwant.html \
http://remoteServer/pageicareabout.html
... my question is how do I do the '--save-cookies' bit in PHP so that I can use the cookie in the follow-up PHP stream_context_create / file_get_contents block:
$opts = array(http'=> array(
'method'=> "GET",
'header'=>
"Accept-language: en\r\n" .
"Cookie: **NoClueAtAll**\r\n"
)
);
$context = stream_context_create($opts);
$documentiwant = file_get_contents("http://remoteServer/pageicareabout.html",
0, $context);
Solution
You'd probably be better off using cURL. Use curl_setopt to set up the cookie handling options.
If this is just a one-off thing, you could use Firefox with Live HTTP Headers to get the header, then paste it into your PHP code.
OTHER TIPS
Shazam - that worked ! Thx soooo much ! In case someone else stumbles upon this page, here's what was needed in detail:
- install cURL (for me it'was as simple as 'sudo apt-get install php5-curl' in ubuntu)
change the prior-listed PHP to the following:
<?php $cr = curl_init('http://remoteServer/login.php?user=xxx&pass=yyy'); curl_setopt($cr, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); curl_setopt($cr, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, 'cookie.txt'); $whoCares = curl_exec($cr); curl_close($cr); $cr = curl_init('http://remoteServer/pageicareabout.html'); curl_setopt($cr, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); curl_setopt($cr, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, 'cookie.txt'); $documentiwant = curl_exec($cr); curl_close($cr); ?>
Above code snippet heavily influenced by http://www.weberdev.com/get_example-4555.html.