fsockopen() and accessing secure site

Anon

I'm trying to access the information at http://baseball.smallworld.com/fullseason/main/manager_other.html?user_id=34696 . The only problem is that you have to login to the site to access this page. If you go to http://baseball.smallworld.com/fullseason/answer_login.html?username=Teamname&password=Password (yes, this url actually words as is), and then go to the first URL, everything works fine.

However, if I go to the second URL to "login" and then try to access the first URL using PHP, I get an error "Unable to find file identifier 0" on my directory.

Using fsockopen(), I was able to gain a connection to baseball.smallworld.com, but I'm not quite sure what I would do after that point to access the page I need. Any suggestions?

Anon

Phred,

Your problem is that when you go to the URL to login, it sets a cookie. Then it requires that cookie to access the second page (they one you want).

That's a rather large obstacle. You are headed in the right direction since you are looking into connecting to the server yourself. The only advice I have for you is:

Open the login site in a regular browser and examine the cookies it sets.
Read up on cookies and figure out how to send them to the web server.
Open a connection to the page you want, send the cookies that the first page set, and then you should get the page.

There may be some problems with hard-coding the cookies like I have recommended. The cookies may contain some sort of a time stamp, in which case your PHP code would have to open a connection to the login page and get the cookies and then open a connection to the second page and send the cookies, every time you wanted to get the second page.

Hope this is useful...

Vincent Vatter

Anon

I can get the cookie information, and it appears the date stamp is pretty generous. This is what I get from the fsockopen() function:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK Set-cookie: cookie=007084952548009352; path=/ Content-type: text/html Set-Cookie: SWPC=007084952548009352;path=/;
expires=Wednesday, 01-Jan-2025 00:00:00 GMT Cache-control: private Content-length: 0"

Now, since the cookie isn't set to expire until 01/01/2025, it seems like I should be able to use the cookie. But how could I send the cookie with the URL using PHP?

Hope I'm not just repeating what you said. 🙂

Anon

I'm not sure if this makes things easier or not, but I can access the page I want to get the information from through the following URL:

http://baseball.smallworld.com/fullseason/main/team.html?username=Teamname&password=Password (again, this URL will actually work. It's a dummy team setup).

I just need to know how to open this page with PHP. Any suggestions?

Anon

try sending the output instead to an echo $output TRY header($output)

I'm not sure if that works, but you may as well check