Getting text from remote URL

[Hoth]

In PHP, I have no trouble getting text from a local file and assigning it to a variable with fopen and fread... but as soon as I try to use it on a remote URL it stops working, even though the PHP manual says fopen should work on URLs.

When I use this, on any valid URL, the result of echoing $filecontents at the end is that it's blank:

$fd = fopen($url, 'r');
$filecontents = fread ($fd, filesize($url));
fclose ($fd);

Somebody on another forum suggested trying fsockopen, but using that it still doesn't function. Again it doesn't read any data when I fsockopen... $ftest never takes on any value no matter what the URL when I use

ftest = fsockopen ($url, 80, $errno, $errstr, 30);

Any ideas on how to read text from a URL?

 

[Noldar]

My guess would be that filesize cannot determine the size of a remote file, so it's probably just returning 0. Try replacing filesize with a sufficiently large number so that you have something like:

$fd = fopen($url, 'r');
$filecontents = fread ($fd, 1000000);
fclose ($fd);

Richard

 

[Kaliber]

permissions my friend.... if you don't have permissions to that file you can't access it.

 

[Hoth]

Noldar - That seems to have been the problem, with that change it works perfectly. Thanks.

MindRash - Everyone has permission to read a regular web page, you can access URLs through PHP the same as you would through a web browser.