allow_url_fopen ON but not working

[rajaraja]

I have a small script that does a simple fopen(), grabbing the name for the file to be downloaded from a second script. I can use fopen() to successfully open that script but as soon as I feed any parameters to the url to fopen, it balks. It even fails if I just add a '?' to the url. So, this is found:

/absolute/path/to/web/myscript.pl

But this isn't:

Warning: fopen(/absolute/path/to/web/myscript.pl?):

failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /absolute/path/to/web/myphpscript.php on line 19
/absolute/path/to/web/myscript.pl? not found.

This script works fine on a variety of different servers but fails on a Valueweb shared account. allow_url_fopen is on and Valueweb stipulate that you must use an absolute or relative path, not a url, but they haven't been helpful in giving any advice as to why the query would fail whereas the path works and is correct. Am I overlooking something obvious--like paths not allowing parameters? Any workarounds anyone can suggest?

[drew010]

an absolute path is a location to a filename, so as soon as you put a ? on myscript.pl its now looking for 'myscript.pl?' as the filename, which doesnt exist. You must use [url]http://[/url] and then the webserver url in order to be using a url fopen. also the fopen wont support a query string, you must use file_get_contents if you wish to use a query string in the url

[rajaraja]

Ah, thanks, Drew. That makes sense. fopen() works fine in this script on other hosts when we use a url with a query string but Valueweb has shut down the ability to use a url. They only allow paths. Given that limitation, what are our options? curl?

[drew010]

curl or fsockopen