file($url) problem - fulling server into thinking you're a web browser

[Leester]

Hi there,

I want to try and grab the HTML of a web page, but I have a little
problem - the web designer/developer of the page! He made it one of
those pages that displays "Please update your browser. This web site
does not support Netscape Naivagator version 1.234" if it "thinks"
your browser isn't up to par.

When I try to use PHP file($URL) function to grab the HTML, my request
doesn't have any header information informing the server what my web
browser is, so I get this message:

Is there any way to fool it my providing bogus meta/header information
in my request? Is there another solution?

Anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance.

- Best regards,
Lee

[Nikolai Chuvakhin]

Re: file($url) problem - fulling server into thinking you're a web browser

lreilly@lanl.go v (Leester) wrote in message
news:<54b56124. 0312141628.156c 5397@posting.go ogle.com>...[color=blue]
>
> Is there any way to fool it my providing bogus meta/header information
> in my request?[/color]

Yes. More than one, actually. You can either use cURL:

http://www.php.net/curl

or try a homebrewed solution:

$host = 'www.yourhost.c om';
$path = 'path/page.htm';
$fp = fsockopen ($host, '80');
if ($fp) {
fputs($fp, 'GET '.$path." HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: ".$host."\r\n") ;
fputs($fp, "User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows
NT 5.0)\r\n");
} else {
die ('Oops... Nobody home...');
}
$data = '';
while (!feof ($fp)) {
$data .= fgets ($fp, 10240);
}
fclose ($fp);

Cheers,
NC