Chapter 20. Using remote files

As long as support for the "URL fopen wrapper" is enabled when you configure PHP (which it is unless you explicitly pass the --disable-url-fopen-wrapper flag to configure (for versions up to 4.0.3) or set allow_url_fopen to off in php.ini (for newer versions), you can use HTTP and FTP URLs with most functions that take a filename as a parameter, including the require() and include() statements.

For example, you can use this to open a file on a remote web server, parse the output for the data you want, and then use that data in a database query, or simply to output it in a style matching the rest of your website.

Example 20-1. Getting the title of a remote page <?php $file = fopen ("http://www.php.net/", "r"); if (!$file) { echo "<p>Unable to open remote file.\n"; exit; } while (!feof ($file)) { $line = fgets ($file, 1024); /* This only works if the title and its tags are on one line */ if (eregi ("<title>(.*)</title>", $line, $out)) { $title = $out[1]; break; } } fclose($file); ?>

You can also write to files on an FTP as long you connect as a user with the correct access rights, and the file doesn't exist already. To connect as a user other than 'anonymous', you need to specify the username (and possibly password) within the URL, such as 'ftp://user:password@ftp.example.com/path/to/file'. (You can use the same sort of syntax to access files via HTTP when they require Basic authentication.)

Example 20-2. Storing data on a remote server <?php $file = fopen ("ftp://ftp.php.net/incoming/outputfile", "w"); if (!$file) { echo "<p>Unable to open remote file for writing.\n"; exit; } /* Write the data here. */ fputs ($file, "$HTTP_USER_AGENT\n"); fclose ($file); ?>