Set the User Agent With PHP cURL
A few months back, I shared with you how to download the contents of a URL and execute a HTTP POST transmission using PHP cURL. For security purposes, some hosts require that a common user agent be present in the POST. If an unacceptable user agent is given, the POST is ignored. Luckily, cURL allows us to "spoof" the server using any user agent we choose:
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');
A little sneaky but it could get you out of a jam at some point!
![CSS vs. JS Animation: Which is Faster?]()
How is it possible that JavaScript-based animation has secretly always been as fast — or faster — than CSS transitions? And, how is it possible that Adobe and Google consistently release media-rich mobile sites that rival the performance of native apps?
This article serves as a point-by-point...
![An Interview with Eric Meyer]()
Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it?
At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...
![Dynamic Waveform Visualizations with wavesurfer.js]()
Waveform images are an awesome addition to boring audio widgets. They can be functional as well as aesthetically pleasing, allowing users to navigate audio visually. I recently found wavesurfer.js, an amazing waveform image utility that uses to Web Audio API to create super customizable...
![MooTools Fun with Fx.Shake]()
Adding movement to your website is a great way to attract attention to specific elements that you want users to notice. Of course you could use Flash or an animated GIF to achieve the movement effect but graphics can be difficult to maintain. Enter...
Thanks for this tip. Was working on a project and found your tip very handy.
Thanks for this! Was needed for a wikipedia curl request.
Thanks for this, it for me too.
hi..
How to check whether a user agent string is supported by all the urls or not ? I have tried many urls with different user agent strings but I couldn’t find any user agent which is supported by all urls. When a user agent string is not supported, I get 0 (zero) as http response code and null as mime type. Please help.
Thanks, without setting user agent I was getting this error:
at
nl.bitwalker.useragentutils.Browser.isInUserAgentString(Browser.java:154)“for security purposes”… that’s incredibly weak security. I think it’s more common for the website to be doing useragent sniffing (to tailor the response to the browser), and simply not bothering to support uncommon useragents.
perfect – thank for the tip!
Thank, that helped!
i get error code like this.
curl_setopt()expects parameter 1 to be resource,nullgiven in/home/xxxx/xxxxxTry this…
function scrap($url) { $curl = curl_init($url); curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "My User Agent Name"); curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true); curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true); curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); $html = curl_exec($curl); curl_close($curl); return $html; }You are getting the error as
curl_setopt()required first parameter as a resource returned by thecurl_init($url);This, in fact, just got me out of a jam.
Almost a full 10 years later and this post just really helped me out! Thanks!