php: Get url content (json) with cURL

Question

I want to access https://graph.facebook.com/19165649929?fields=name (obviously it's also accessable with "http") with cURL to get the file's content, more specific: I need the "name" (it's json). Since allow_url_fopen is disabled on my webserver, I can't use get_file_contents! So I tried it this way:

<?php
$page = 'http://graph.facebook.com/19165649929?fields=name';
$ch = curl_init();
//$useragent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1";
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $useragent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $page);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
?>

With that code I get a blank page! When I use another page, like http://www.google.com it works like a charm (I get the page's content). I guess facebook is checking something I don't know... What can it be? How can I make the code work? Thanks!

Answer 1

Note that the Facebook Graph API requires authentication before you can view any of these pages.

You basically got two options for this. Either you login as an application (you've registered before) or as a user. See the api documentation to find out how this works.

My recommendation for you is to use the official PHP-SDK. You'll find it here. It does all the session and cURL magic for you and is very easy to use. Take the examples which are included in the package and start to experiment.

Good luck.

Answer 2

did you double post this here? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3592270/php-get-html-source-code-with-curl

however in the thread above we found your problem beeing unable to resolve the host and this was the solution:

//$url = "https://graph.facebook.com/19165649929?fields=name";
$url = "https://66.220.146.224/19165649929?fields=name";
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Host: graph.facebook.com'));
$output = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);