Performing HTTP GET Requests in PHP

This PHP Tutorial focuses on the use of fread and file_get_contents to download content from the web – in this Tutorial we will focus on the HTTP protocol, but it may also work for HTTPs – Using the methods covered in this Tutorial, requires that the fopen wrappers has been enabled, enabling the wrappers can be done by setting allow_url_fopen in php.ini toOn.

Performing HTTP requests can be useful for many things. Logging in on other websites, simply getting the content of a webpage, or checking for new versions of a PHP application. This PHP Tutorial will show you how to perform simple requests over HTTP, we will show how to set request headers in a later Tutorial.

Using Fread to Download of get Files Over the web

It is also possible to read a web page, just remember that reading will stop after a packet is available, so you either have to use a function like stream_get_contents – similar to file_get_contents – or you can use a while loop to read the content in smaller chunks until the end of the file has been reached.

<?php
$handle = fopen("http://brugbart.com/", "rb");
$contents = stream_get_contents($handle);
fclose($handle);
?>

<?php
$handle = fopen("http://brugbart.com/", "rb");
$contents = '';
while (!feof($handle)) {
  $contents .= fread($handle, 8192);
}
fclose($handle);
echo $contents;
?>

In this case the last argument in the fread function is equal to the chunk size, this is usually not larger than 8192 (8*1024). Keep in mind that this can be larger or smaller, but may also be limited by the system PHP is running on – you can likely optimize your PHP scripts by not using a larger chunk-size than that of your storage device.

Using File_get_contents to get a Website URL

It may also be easier to use this method when reading a file over HTTP, as you do not have to think about reading in chunks – everything is handled by PHP.

<?php
$homepage = file_get_contents('http://brugbart.com/');
echo $homepage;
?>