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403 Forbidden when using PHP file_get_contents

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Will Fong

08 Jul, 2012 09:03 PM

Hi. I wrote a PHP script to grab some of my drops. It recently stopped working with this error message:

[Sun Jul 08 13:49:32 2012] [error] [client 67.183.142.XXX] PHP Warning: file_get_contents(http://d.pr/i/vkVo+): failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden\r\n in xxx

It was working a few months ago, but I haven't been using it in a while so I don't know what changed. The code looks like this:

$url = "http://d.pr/i/vkVo"; file_get_contents( $url.'+' );

If I use wget to grab the file, the URL works as expected. I think it's something PHP isn't doing, but I the only error I get is a 403. Any guidance would be appreciated.

Thanks!
-will

1. 2 Posted by Marcel on 10 Jul, 2012 05:32 AM

   

   Hi,

   I think it is a protection. You have to set the userclient otherwise the webserver sent a 403.
   Maybe you should try curl to make your operation.
   You can try this function to check if an other status code will appear:

   function url_exists($url) {
     $ch = curl_init($url);
     curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_HEADER,true);
     curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST,false);
     curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_FAILONERROR,true);
     curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
       // set user agent
       $userAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3) AppleWebKit/534.53.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1.3";
       curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $userAgent);
       curl_exec($ch);
     $curlInfo = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
   
     curl_close ($ch);
   
     if ($curlInfo != 200 && $curlInfo != 302 && $curlInfo != 304) {
        return false;
     } else {
         return true;
     }
   }
   

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2. 3 Posted by Will F on 11 Jul, 2012 06:02 AM

   

   Hi Marcel,

   I tried adding the User-Agent and got the same reply.

   I'm wondering if it's the Location: redirect that is confusing file_get_contents. In any case, I'm going to just use wget to grab the file. I don't want to mess with it anymore :)

   Thanks for your help!

   -will

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3. Bruno de Carvalho closed this discussion on 20 Jul, 2012 04:33 AM.

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