how to get the cookies from a php curl into a variable

Question

So some guy at some other company thought it would be awesome if instead of using soap or xml-rpc or rest or any other reasonable communication protocol he just embedded all of his response as cookies in the header.

I need to pull these cookies out as hopefully an array from this curl response. If I have to waste a bunch of my life writing a parser for this I will be very unhappy.

Does anyone know how this can simply be done, preferably without writing anything to a file?

I will be very grateful if anyone can help me out with this.

Answer 1

If you use CURLOPT_COOKIE_FILE and CURLOPT_COOKIE_JAR curl will read/write the cookies from/to a file. You can, after curl is done with it, read and/or modify it however you want.

Answer 2

My understanding is that cookies from curl must be written out to a file (curl -c cookie_file). If you're running curl through PHP's exec or system functions (or anything in that family), you should be able to save the cookies to a file, then open the file and read them in.

Answer 3

$ch = curl_init('http://www.google.com/');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
preg_match('/^Set-Cookie: (.*?);/m', curl_exec($ch), $m);
var_dump(parse_url($m[1]));

Answer 4

libcurl also provides CURLOPT_COOKIELIST which extracts all known cookies. All you need is to make sure the PHP/CURL binding can use it.