PHP Manual: Accessing HTTP(s) URLs

Description

Allows read-only access to files/resources via HTTP 1.0, using the HTTP GET method. A Host: header is sent with the request to handle name-based virtual hosts. If you have configured a user_agent string using your php.ini file or the stream context, it will also be included in the request.

The stream allows access to the body of the resource; the headers are stored in the $http_response_header variable.

If it's important to know the URL of the resource where your document came from (after all redirects have been processed), you'll need to process the series of response headers returned by the stream.

The from directive will be used for the From: header if set and not overwritten by the Context options and parameters.

Usage

http://example.com
http://example.com/file.php?var1=val1&var2=val2
http://user:password@example.com
https://example.com
https://example.com/file.php?var1=val1&var2=val2
https://user:password@example.com

Options

**Wrapper Summary**
Attribute	Supported
Restricted by allow_url_fopen	Yes
Allows Reading	Yes
Allows Writing	No
Allows Appending	No
Allows Simultaneous Reading and Writing	N/A
Supports stat	No
Supports unlink	No
Supports rename	No
Supports mkdir	No
Supports rmdir	No

Changelog

Version	Description
4.3.7	Detect buggy IIS servers to avoid "SSL: Fatal Protocol Error" errors.
4.3.0	Added https://.
4.0.5	Added support for redirects.

Examples

Example #1 Detecting which URL we ended up on after redirects


<?php
$url = 'http://www.example.com/redirecting_page.php';

$fp = fopen($url, 'r');

$meta_data = stream_get_meta_data($fp);
foreach ($meta_data['wrapper_data'] as $response) {

    /* Were we redirected? */
    if (strtolower(substr($response, 0, 10)) == 'location: ') {

        /* update $url with where we were redirected to */
        $url = substr($response, 10);
    }

}

?>

Notes

Note: HTTPS is only supported when the openssl extension is enabled.

HTTP connections are read-only; writing data or copying files to an HTTP resource is not supported.

Sending POST and PUT requests, for example, can be done with the help of HTTP Contexts.

http://

https://