file ('http://'); not working

[Mirage]

Hopefully this is simple. I am trying to pull an outside webpage into an array in PHP in order to take values from it..

I have tried this as described on php.net:

$lines = file('http://www.example.com/');

The page just stalls and eventually doesn't do anything. I have a line "done" set to be echoed at the end of the page which also does not appear when I add the above code.

I'm running this on a Windows server with IIS 6.0.

The page I am getting this info from is: http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.file.php

The tip on PHP.net says:

Tip: You can use a URL as a filename with this function if the fopen wrappers have been enabled. See fopen() for more details on how to specify the filename and Appendix M for a list of supported URL protocols.

I have enabled "allow_url_fopen" as well.

I can load local files, but just not remote files. Any ideas?

Thanks!

 

[Mr_Snipes]

Did you enable "allow_url_fopen" in php.ini only?

 

[Mirage]

Only in php.ini.. Was there somewhere else I need to enable it?

 

[Mr_Snipes]

No, that is the only place you can enable it. Just checking to make sure that you did that one, just in case you had not done that yet.

 

[Spinlock]

What are you using to separate the elements in the array?

 

[Mirage]

It didn't matter because it didn't create the array in the first place due to "file" not working.

I have since created an alternative function to do this, but it still bugs me that I can't get the built in function working.

 

[Spinlock]

Okay... let me put it this way.
Does the function work if you just point it to a webpage with EXACTLY one element in it?
Have you tried echoing the content of $lines directly after that line?

 

[myessence]

Hopefully this is simple. I am trying to pull an outside webpage into an array in PHP in order to take values from it..

The page just stalls and eventually doesn't do anything. I have a line "done" set to be echoed at the end of the page which also does not appear when I add the above code.

I've had this happening to me with a few websites.

Turned out I need to set a user_agent on php.ini. Preferably, to a popular one (eg: IE6, Firefox 1.5.x, etc)

A few examples :

// user_agent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90)"
// alternatives:
// "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"
// "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)"
// "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)"
// "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt)"

In another case, increasing default_socket_timeout to 600 helps, especially with those REALLY slow websites

Hope it helps.