file_get_contents receive cookies

Question

Is it possible to receive the cookies set by the remote server when doing a file_get_contents request?

I need php to do a http request and store the cookies and make a second request.

Answer 1

you should use cURL for that purpose, cURL implement a feature called the cookie jar which permit to save cookies in a file and reuse them for subsequent request(s).

Here come a quick code snipet how to do it:

/* STEP 1. let’s create a cookie file */
$ckfile = tempnam ("/tmp", "CURLCOOKIE");
/* STEP 2. visit the homepage to set the cookie properly */
$ch = curl_init ("http://somedomain.com/");
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $ckfile); 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$output = curl_exec ($ch);

/* STEP 3. visit cookiepage.php */
$ch = curl_init ("http://somedomain.com/cookiepage.php");
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $ckfile); 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$output = curl_exec ($ch);

note: has to be noted you should have the pecl extension (or compiled in PHP) installed or you won't have access to the cURL API.

Answer 2

You can either install and use the PECL extension for HTTP, or make sure your php installation was compiled with the optional curl library.

Answer 3

I believe you co do it pretty easily with the Zend_Http object. Here is the documentation about adding cookies to a request.

To get the cookies from a request (automatically retrieved I believe), just use getCookieJar() on the Zend_Http object.

That should be easy to implement; however, the php manual has a user comment on how to deal with cookies using the http stream.