The number of ways of reading an xml file from another server in PHP?

Question

I am trying to read an XML-file from another server. However the the company that's hosting me seems to have turned of the file_get_contents function from retrieving files for files from other servers (and their support is not very bright and it takes forever for them to answer). So I need a work around in some way.

This is my current code

 $url =  urldecode( $object_list_url );
 $xmlstr = file_get_contents ( $url );
 $obj = new SimpleXMLElement ( $xmlstr, LIBXML_NOCDATA );

Answer 1

The ini var you're referring to is allow_url_fopen. To check, run this script:

var_dump(ini_get('allow_url_fopen'));

Ask your host to turn that ini value on (if it's disabled - it's on by default).

You should not be able to access any remote url without that ini setting on.

Also an idea if they won't could be to try copying the file to your server. I expect all filesystem functions will be covered by that ini setting but it's always worth a try.

Answer 2

You could use cURL (if that's not been disabled). Something like this:

$c = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$xmlstr = curl_exec($c);

Answer 3

Can you execute the following script and provide the information as a comment?

<?php
phpinfo();
?>