php download file from remote server, from download url with headers set

Question

Hi,

Im trying to downlaod a file with php that is located on a remote server, and having no luck. Ive tried using fopen, get_file_contents, but nothing has worked.

I am passing in a download URL, which isnt the exact file location, it is the "download url" of the file, which then forces the browser to download.

So Im thinking that is why the file fopen and file_get_contents is failing, can someone tell me what I have to do to download a file from a url with headers set to force file download.

Any help greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

altough you didnt form your question clearly i think i know what you mean. try this function taken from php.net comments

didnt test it but it looks good and seems to follow html header redirects as well as meta and javascript redirects to the file.

<?php

/*==================================
Get url content and response headers (given a url, follows all redirections on it and returned content and response headers of final url)

@return    array[0]    content
        array[1]    array of response headers
==================================*/
function get_url( $url,  $javascript_loop = 0, $timeout = 5 )
{
    $url = str_replace( "&amp;", "&", urldecode(trim($url)) );

    $cookie = tempnam ("/tmp", "CURLCOOKIE");
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1" );
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url );
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie );
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true );
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, "" );
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true );
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true );
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false );    # required for https urls
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout );
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $timeout );
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 10 );
    $content = curl_exec( $ch );
    $response = curl_getinfo( $ch );
    curl_close ( $ch );

    if ($response['http_code'] == 301 || $response['http_code'] == 302)
    {
        ini_set("user_agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1");

        if ( $headers = get_headers($response['url']) )
        {
            foreach( $headers as $value )
            {
                if ( substr( strtolower($value), 0, 9 ) == "location:" )
                    return get_url( trim( substr( $value, 9, strlen($value) ) ) );
            }
        }
    }

    if (    ( preg_match("/>[[:space:]]+window\.location\.replace\('(.*)'\)/i", $content, $value) || preg_match("/>[[:space:]]+window\.location\=\"(.*)\"/i", $content, $value) ) &&
            $javascript_loop < 5
    )
    {
        return get_url( $value[1], $javascript_loop+1 );
    }
    else
    {
        return array( $content, $response );
    }
}

?>

Answer 2

While not technically a duplicate, this has been asked on SO before: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2747664/how-to-get-redirecting-url-link-with-php-from-bit-ly

Your problem is that file_get_contents does not follow redirects. See the linked answer for a solution.