Calling another site?

Question

OK - Simply, I'm building a site that needs to incorporate an existing page, protected with a simple .htaccess/.htpasswd script.

How can I pass the username/password to the receiving site using PHP?

Thanks in advance for your help!!!

UPDATE - I think I may have over-complicated the question. What I'm needing to do is essentially:

<a href="http://username:[email protected]/" target="_blank">The link<a>

Which, actually, works perfectly in everything but IE . I'm golden if I can find a more universal, simple solution.

Thanks in advance for your help, all!

Answer 1

If you are using the file_get_contents function to download the page, you can use something like this:

$data = file_get_contents('http://username:[email protected]/path/');

Answer 2

You'll be best off if you get to know the curl library, a good introduction can be found here, including how to submit a suername and password.

Answer 3

You can pass the username and password in plain-text via a simple http redirect, in the format

http://username:[email protected]/yourpage

However, you probably shouldn't - some browsers now explicitly bother you for confirmation when they see this syntax.

You can hide this from the user however, by loading the above URL with file_get_contents() and dumping the results to the browser. This won't work if the HTML output of the page uses relative links to external files (images/js/css) on its server.

Answer 4

I agree with alxp that you should get to know cURL. The basic gist is that when using HTTP Basic Auth, credentials are sent as a base64 encoded string in the headers. Here's a simple example using PHP's cURL extension:

$url = '...';
$username = '...';
$password = '...';

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
    "Authorization: Basic " . base64_encode($username . ":" . $password)
));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);

$result = curl_exec($ch);
print $result; 

Hope that helps! Read up on HTTP Basic here and PHP's cURL extension here

Please keep in mind that this is example code and contains no error checking, etc.