How do I...pull pages that require authentication

s_shrum

I've been looking into Dyndns and saw that someone wrote a Python script that pulls the WAN IP from a LinkSys router for submission to Dyndns. I decided I'd do the same thing in PHP (for practice, for experience, for the open-source community, and for those that rather not have to deal with installing yet another scripting language on their machines).

The first hurdle so to speak would be handling a page request that requires authentication...How do I do this?

Granted, the user will need to supply the IP, U/N, and P/W...I then need to make a call to <IP>/Status.htm with the supplied params and do a little regex to pull the WAN IP out.

That part I can handle...it's the initial fetching of the page that I'm having issues with (no code yet but haven't found anything that addresses this directly).

If someone knows of a function that deals with this or has written a function, please pass it along.

TIA

Weedpacket

If a site sends back an authentication challenge (a header which reads something like

WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="FooRealm"

)
then the client is expect to send back as part of its request headers the appropriate Authorization: header

Authorization: Basic QWxhZGRpbjpvcGVuIHNlc2FtZQ==

Where that blurt of base64-encoded text is the username and password, separated by ':', for the relevant realm. There is also such a beast as digest authentication, which is a bit more secure that what is effectively plain text.

The relevant specification is RFC2617

s_shrum

I've read about all that but my question is, how do I code a block to deal with sending / receiving headers.

I've made out that I can send headers with header();

But I have had no luck requesting them.

I'm used to just using get_file_contents()

Any code snippets you can provided would be most helpful.

...and, yes, I've read the 'Collected answers' post...it doesn't discuss how to GET header responses, just sending them. :-)

TIA

s_shrum

I think I found what I need....CURL.

If I've strayed off the yellow brick road, please yank my butt-din-skie back on track.

TIA