cURL alternative?

[sid]

I am working on a client project right now and am supposed to perform an action, which logs in to a site remotely, pulls some data and calculates a report out of that. long story short, usually i take care of this with curl. however - the client doesn't have access to it on his machine, meaning i will have to figure out some other way to accomplish this login-in-the-background-and-download-data task.

any ideas anyone?
any feedback is much appreciated - thanks in advance!

[MarkR]

You can do almost all of the functionality of curl with fopen and other stream functions using the http wrapper.

In some cases you'll need to create a stream context. See the streams documentation (and in particular HTTP wrapper documentation) for details.

Mark

[jazz_snob]

If you don't have access to curl() PHP function, then you can use fsockopen or see if you can use curl via exec if curl is installed on the server.

$arr = array(); # capture output if any
$result = FALSE; # return code from curl
exec($path_to_curl, $arr, $result);

Might have to send some switches and obviously your args to curl as well.

Always be careful when calling exec(): validate the data and escape strings. To find path to curl write a script that says something like:

$result = FALSE;
$arr = array();
exec("which curl", $arr, $result);
print_r($arr);

All my 'bot' projects have been in perl, not php. Just simpler IMHO.

[Kudose]

echo `which curl`;

Much simpler.