PHP GET Request, sending headers

Question

I need to perform a get request and send headers along with it. What can I use to do this?

The main header I need to set is the browser one. Is there an easy way to do this?

Hispaniola

Are you writing PHP code to perform the GET request, or do you want to use your browser (or something else) to simulate different user agents requesting your PHP pages? – Chenoweth

I am writing code to perform the request and store the response as a string. – Hispaniola

What "browser" header are you referring to? Do you mean you need to return the user agent string? – Verdure

Answer 1

If you're using cURL, you can use curl_setopt ($handle, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'browser description') to define the user-agent header of the request.

If you're using file_get_contents, check out this tweak of an example on the man page for file_get_contents:

// Create a stream
$opts = array(
  'http'=>array(
    'method'=>"GET",
    'header'=>"Accept-language: en\r\n" .
              "Cookie: foo=bar\r\n" .
              "User-agent: BROWSER-DESCRIPTION-HERE\r\n"
  )
);

$context = stream_context_create($opts);

// Open the file using the HTTP headers set above
$file = file_get_contents('http://www.example.com/', false, $context);

Chenoweth

Can I make a HTTPS request witht this? – Depression

@Purushotamrawat - Yes, if you follow the instructions here, for quick/dirty test I added this to my $opts: 'ssl' => array('verify_peer'=>false, 'verify_peer_name'=>false) and it worked – Kaila

Answer 2

If you are requesting a page, use cURL.

In order to set the headers (in this case, the User-Agent header in the HTTP request, you would use this syntax:

<?php
$curl_h = curl_init('http://www.example.com/');

curl_setopt($curl_h, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER,
    array(
        'User-Agent: NoBrowser v0.1 beta',
    )
);

# do not output, but store to variable
curl_setopt($curl_h, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

$response = curl_exec($curl_h);

Revolving

Answer 3

You can use the header function for that, example:

header('Location: http://www.example.com?var=some_value');

Note that:

Remember that header() must be called before any actual output is sent, either by normal HTML tags, blank lines in a file, or from PHP. It is a very common error to read code with include(), or require(), functions, or another file access function, and have spaces or empty lines that are output before header() is called. The same problem exists when using a single PHP/HTML file.

Garvy

I need to store the response from the request into a string for processing. So I cannot use this method. – Hispaniola

@James Jeffery: I don't understand what you mean by that, could you be more specific or add more details to your question? Thanks – Garvy

Are you trying to use AJAX? Or access PHP variables with Javascript? – Verdure

The Header function is to modifiy the GET response not the actual request. – Reveal

curl_setopt is the way to achieve this – Asafoetida