file_get_contents returns 403 forbidden

I am trying to make a sitescraper. I made it on my local machine and it works very fine there. When I execute the same on my server, it shows a 403 forbidden error. I am using the PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser. The error I get on the server is this:

Warning: file_get_contents(http://example.com/viewProperty.html?id=7715888) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden in /home/scraping/simple_html_dom.php on line 40

The line of code triggering it is:

$url="http://www.example.com/viewProperty.html?id=".$id;

$html=file_开发者_JS百科get_html($url);

I have checked the php.ini on the server and allow_url_fopen is On. Possible solution can be using curl, but I need to know where I am going wrong.

I know it's quite an old thread but thought of sharing some ideas.

Most likely if you don't get any content while accessing an webpage, probably it doesn't want you to be able to get the content. So how does it identify that a script is trying to access the webpage, not a human? Generally, it is the User-Agent header in the HTTP request sent to the server.

So to make the website think that the script accessing the webpage is also a human you must change the User-Agent header during the request. Most web servers would likely allow your request if you set the User-Agent header to an value which is used by some common web browser.

A list of common user agents used by browsers are listed below:

• Chrome: 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.102 Safari/537.36'

• Firefox: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:75.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/75.0

• etc...

$context = stream_context_create(
    array(
        "http" => array(
            "header" => "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.102 Safari/537.36"
        )
    )
);

echo file_get_contents("www.google.com", false, $context);

This piece of code, fakes the user agent and sends the request to https://google.com.

References:

• stream_context_create

Cheers!

This is not a problem with your script, but with the resource you are requesting. The web server is returning the "forbidden" status code.

It could be that it blocks PHP scripts to prevent scraping, or your IP if you have made too many requests.

You should probably talk to the administrator of the remote server.

Add this after you include the simple_html_dom.php

ini_set('user_agent', 'My-Application/2.5');

You can change it like this in parser class from line 35 and on.

function curl_get_contents($url)
{
  $ch = curl_init();
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
  $data = curl_exec($ch);
  curl_close($ch);
  return $data;
}

function file_get_html()
{
  $dom = new simple_html_dom;
  $args = func_get_args();
  $dom->load(call_user_func_array('curl_get_contents', $args), true);
  return $dom;
}

Have you tried other site?

It seems that the remote server has some type of blocking. It may be by user-agent, if it's the case you can try using curl to simulate a web browser's user-agent like this:

$url="http://www.example.com/viewProperty.html?id=".$id;
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_USERAGENT,'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13');
$html = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

Write this in simple_html_dom.php for me it worked

function curl_get_contents($url)
{
  $ch = curl_init();
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_USERAGENT,'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13');
$html = curl_exec($ch);
  $data = curl_exec($ch);
  curl_close($ch);
  return $data;
}

function file_get_html($url, $use_include_path = false, $context=null, $offset = -1, $maxLen=-1, $lowercase = true, $forceTagsClosed=true, $target_charset = DEFAULT_TARGET_CHARSET, $stripRN=true, $defaultBRText=DEFAULT_BR_TEXT, $defaultSpanText=DEFAULT_SPAN_TEXT)
{
    $dom = new simple_html_dom;
  $args = func_get_args();
  $dom->load(call_user_func_array('curl_get_contents', $args), true);
  return $dom;
    //$dom = new simple_html_dom(null, $lowercase, $forceTagsClosed, $target_charset, $stripRN, $defaultBRText, $defaultSpanText);

}

I realize this is an old question, but...

Just setting up my local sandbox on linux with php7 and ran across this. Using the terminal run scripts, php calls php.ini for the CLI. I found that the "user_agent" option was commented out. I uncommented it and added a Mozilla user agent, now it works.

Did you check your permissions on file? I set up 777 on my file (in localhost, obviously) and I fixed the problem.

You also may need some additional information in the conext, to make the website belive that the request comes from a human. What a did was enter the website from the browser an copying any extra infomation that was sent in the http request.

$context = stream_context_create(
        array(
            "http" => array(
                'method'=>"GET",
                "header" => "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) 
                            AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) 
                            Chrome/50.0.2661.102 Safari/537.36\r\n" .
                            "accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,
                            image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3\r\n" .
                            "accept-language: es-ES,es;q=0.9,en;q=0.8,it;q=0.7\r\n" . 
                            "accept-encoding: gzip, deflate, br\r\n"
            )
        )
    );

In my case, the server was rejecting HTTP 1.0 protocol via it's .htaccess configuration. It seems file_get_contents is using HTTP 1.0 version.

Use below code: if you use -> file_get_contents

$context  = stream_context_create(
  array(
    "http" => array(
      "header" => "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.102 Safari/537.36"
    )
));

========= if You use curl,

curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT,'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.102 Safari/537.36');