fopen, fsockopen, any other way... HELP

amarques

Hi all,

I need a little script that connects to a remote web server, reads the contents of a file and writes them in a local file.

Something like www.example1.com -> connects to www.example2.com and reads file -> wites file in www.example1.com.

The problem I'm facing is that I need this to work independently of safe_mode and allow_url_fopen being set or not in www.example1.com.

I tried using fopen and it worked very well if allow_url_fopen is set. Same thing for copy().

How would you do it?

My next approach was using fsockopen but I'm very new to all this and can't make it work. Is there any other way to do it? Would fsockopne even work on a safe_mode set server?

Thanks for any help.

NogDog

[man]cURL[/man]

amarques

But for cURL to work, www.example1.com would need the curl library right? I have no control over this... So, do you think the majority of web hosts have this installed by default?

NogDog

I think (though cannot prove) that the number of sites that do not have the cURL extension enabled are fewer than those that have allow_url_fopen disabled. If neither is enabled, you're probably pretty much out of luck when it comes to accessing external URLs.

You could put in some conditional logic, perhaps:

if(ini_get('allow_url_fopen'))
{
   // use file_get_contents()
}
elseif(function_exists(curl_exec))
{
   // use cURL
}
else
{
   // raise error/exception that the configuration is no good
}

amarques

Ok, thanks. I'll give it a try that way.

But would fsockopen work if no allow_url_fopen is set? and what about if safe_mode is on?

NogDog

Good question: I have no answer other than to try it. You could set up a local installation of PHP on a PC so that you can mess around with the allow_url_fopen and safe_mode settings and see what happens.

amarques

I'll do that. Thanks.