Help with CURL.

mcorkum

Hi all,

I'm very new to php - so please be patient with me.

I'm having a problem using curl. If this is not the right place to post about this perhaps someone could point me in the right direction.

I want to offer my client an alternative to iframes. I came across curl which seems that it would do the trick. Problem is, the site i'm trying to pull the info from keeps telling me that I need to be able to accept cookies. I've tried looking everywhere to figure out a solution, but I really don't know what to do.

Below is what I have. The URL has obviously been changed. Am I using it wrong?

<?php
$usecookie = "cookie.txt";  

$ch = curl_init() or die(curl_error()); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,"http://www.example.com"); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $usecookie);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $usecookie);   

$data1=curl_exec($ch) or die(curl_error()); 
echo "<font color=black face=verdana size=3>".$data1."</font>"; 
echo curl_error($ch); 
curl_close($ch); 
?>

bretticus

Typically, the way this works is they either have a splash page that redirects or they just redirect you the first time you get to the website to the same page. Thus, the first page load returns and cookie, and the subsequent page load checks for that cookie value. If that value is not found, then they print out the error message.

There's probably a good reason the other website requires cookies. Whether to see if you are logged in, or perhaps some feature relies on cookies for the layout, etc. Since I don't now which website, it's hard for me to be any more specific.

One way you can find out is by downloading the Live HTTP Headers extension for Firefox. You can go to that website and just check to see what the cookies contain. It'll be up to you to figure out if the cookie returned is always the same, or has random data, etc.

If they are using a session cookie to ascertain the browsers cookie state, there is an example from the manual that shows a way to get a session cookie and use it on a subsequent request (send it back with the subsequent request.) I have no idea if it works.

God luck!