php file_get_contents($url) & turns into &

Question

I am trying to make a request to the coinbase api like this

$url = "https://api.gdax.com/products/BTC-USD/candles?start=".date($format,$starting_date)."&end=".date($format,$ending_date)."&granularity=".$granularity;

and then I pass that in file_get_contents($url) but it gives me an error

file_get_contents(https://api.gdax.com/products/BTC-USD/candles?start=2015-05-07&end=2015-05-08&granularity=900): failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request.

The problem of course is when the '&' gets changed into '&'.

Polycarp

Are you sure this is the problem? since going directly to that url works fine. – Future

Maybe not. but what else could be the reason that it isn't returning the file contents and instead an error. – Polycarp

this might answer your question : #3710647 – Future

There seems to be a bug in PHP 7.0 causing this for valid URL strings. Switching to 7.1 resolves it. – Talus

Answer 1

It seems you need define an user agent. Try this;

$url = "https://api.gdax.com/products/BTC-USD/candles?start=2015-05-07&end=2015-05-08&granularity=900";

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_USERAGENT,"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

var_dump($result);

If you still insist on using file_get_contents then it is still possible to use user agent;

$url = "https://api.gdax.com/products/BTC-USD/candles?start=2015-05-07&end=2015-05-08&granularity=900";

$options = array(
    "http"=>array(
        "header"=>"User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.102011-10-16 20:23:10\r\n" // i.e. An iPad
    )
);

$context = stream_context_create($options);
$result = file_get_contents($url, false, $context);
var_dump($result);

For more information you can check file_get_contents and stream_context_create (for using headers) documentation

Erdah

it dumped bool(false) – Polycarp

Then you have a different problem. It's OK with me. I get results with both cURL and file_get_contents – Northwester

it didn't work with curl, but the edited file_get_contents,WORKED. but could you please describe what is happening. – Polycarp

The API expects User Agent to be set without setting an user agent, it simply doesn't work. I simply set user agent in order API to output a result with given parameters. – Northwester

Ok. thats great. Thanks a million! – Polycarp

My pleasure, I wish you best of luck with your projects. – Northwester

Answer 2

Posting this because it worked best for me. I know it is an old question.

I found that when building the query using http_build_query the ampersand problem went away.

Example

$url = 'https://example.url';

// http_build_query builds the query from an array
$query_array = array (
    'search' => $string,
    'from' => $from,
    'to' => $to,
    'format' => 'json'
);

$query = http_build_query($query_array);
$result = file_get_contents($url . '?' . $query);

edit: just saw @joshi s answer (actually followed the link), and http_build_query is used there.

Viosterol

Answer 3

This can happen when one of the parameters you send is not urlencoded.

When php sees malformed url (e,g: with spaces or other url blacklisted characters) it urlencode's the full request.

Vacla

Answer 4

Try replacing the double quotes for single quotes. It's the simplest answer listed here:

php file_get_contents and &

The top one is more involved, but is probably a safer bet.

Luanneluanni

Answer 5

Give a try to :

$url = html_entity_decode($url);
file_get_contents($url);

For details on html_entity_decode

UPDATED

Try replacing

& with & in url as below

$url = "https://api.gdax.com/products/BTC-USD/candles?start=".date($format,$starting_date)."&end=".date($format,$ending_date)."&granularity=".$granularity;

Crystalcrystalline

Answer 6

You can revert the htmlspecialchars by using :

htmlspecialchars_decode();

try calling file_get_contents like so :

file_get_contents(htmlspecialchars_decode($url));

Future