Getting dynamic HTML output from another page on a server (perhaps file_get_contents)

Question

I'm using the MVC framework CodeIgniter for my work, if it's relevant.

In one of my pages/controllers, I want to capture the HTML outputted by another page on the site as a string (to use as an email or newsletter). I tried:

$string = file_get_contents('http://www.examplesite.com/path/to/page');

But $string just becomes false, which the documentation says means it failed. I must be missing something tragic...

Answer 1

Maybe you can try using cURL. You can see an example here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/curl.examples-basic.php

Answer 2

fopen_wrappers is probably disabled on your server. Try using Curl

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,'http://www.examplesite.com/path/to/page');
$html = curl_exec($ch);

Answer 3

I've got a slightly better solution that at least works. CodeIgniter allows a third argument for the call to the view so that I can do this:

$string = $this->load->view('path/to/view', '', true);

This still doesn't resolve my initial concern of duplicating the calls in the controller, but at least it's better. Note that this DOES still require me to know exactly which controller is being used.

Answer 4

You seem to have answered your own question. You might consider doing the following which will let you load an arbitrary page:

/* index method inside example controller */
function index($url) {
    $content = $this->load->view(urldecode($url), '', true);
}

// requesting this page generates string output for a specified url
$url = urlencode('/relative/path/to/view/');
http://www.example.com/index.php/example/index/ . $url;