accessing remote HTML files

Anon

Hello,

I am finding some trouble with the use of fopen() or file(), to acces a remote HTML file from a PHP script.

The code is as simple as this:

$fcontents = implode ('', file ('http://www.stanford.edu/'));

$fp = fopen ("http://www.google.com/", "r");

In all but a few cases I get the message:

Warning: php_hostconnect: connect failed...

I am using PHP 4.0.6, on Windows ME+Apache 2.0.36.

The few successful cases correspond to servers in the same university.

What can explain this "sometimes-yes-sometimes-not" behavior?

Thanks in advance!

crusty_php

you need to state what file you want to open.

if (!$file=fopen("http://www.google.com/index.html","rb")){
echo ("could not open file");
}else{
fpassthru($file);
}

rrijnders

The fopen() function does not handle re-directs. Many times when you access another web server, the server will actually re-direct your browser to another file. For example:

You request http://www.somesite.com/
The somesite server will redirect your browser to: http://www.somesite.com/index.html

This will cause fopen() to fail and it is all dependent on the type and configuration of the remote server you are trying to get the page from.

-- Rich