Opening external file (using file or fopen)

Anon

Having a problem when using either file() or fopen() to try and open a remote page (eg: file("http://www.somewhere.com/index.html")).

Seems if either command appears anywhere in the script, none of the script will execute and the browser will get back an empty page (netscape reports "Document contains no data", IE reports that it has received an invalid response). This happens regardless of anything else that's happening in the script - a script with ONLY one of these lines still fails. I would think at least SOME of the script (the parts before that command) should execute but they do not. As well there is plain HTML before that point and not even it is transmitted. The kicker is that I get NO error messages, not in the output and none in either the Apache error or access logs!

Strangly enough it works fine on my test machine running NT and Apache, but not on my production server running Red Hat & Apache. Perhaps there is a setting / module that is not installed or configured correctly by I'm at a loss to find any documentation on it.

Sample code is below. Any help would be greatly appreciated - it's driving me nuts!

<-- Sample Code -->
$HTMLfile = file("http://www.somewhere.com/index.html");

$HTMLfile = fopen("http://www.somewhere.com/index.html","r");
</-- Sample Code -->

Thanks!
Travis

Anon

as an example:

$file = fopen($url, "r");
$rf = fread($file, 32000); // read 32KB //
fclose($file);

which is basically what you are doing, & is fine - however if you are behind a proxy server or firewall - you can not access remote files, you can use fsockopen() but thats no good to retrieve the file contents.

If this is your problem, you need to get your host to cache files locally for you to access.

To check if this is the problem - find a page that is on the same server, but not on your domain - try and read that file - it will probably succeed, or even use an absolute reference to a page on your own domain - if that works - it is a server issue. - Talk to your host , mine caches files locally for me so I can grab headlines etc.

Anon

Good thought! Unfortunatly it fails as well - for both content on the same server under a different domain name as well as content under the same domain. :-(

Just the existance of the line $filex = fopen("http://www.anywhere.com/index.html", "r");
kills it, regardless of anything else in the script.

Any other ideas? (Help!)

Travis