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!
![LightFace: Facebook Lightbox for MooTools]()
One of the web components I've always loved has been Facebook's modal dialog. This "lightbox" isn't like others: no dark overlay, no obnoxious animating to size, and it doesn't try to do "too much." With Facebook's dialog in mind, I've created LightFace: a Facebook lightbox...
![Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us]()
Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...
![WordPress-Style Comment Controls Using MooTools or jQuery]()
WordPress has a nice little effect on the Admin Dashboard where it shows and hides the comment control links when you mouseover and mouseout of the record's container. Here's how to achieve that effect using MooTools or jQuery.
The XHTML
Notice that we place the links into...
![Introducing LazyLoad 2.0]()
While improvements in browsers means more cool APIs for us to play with, it also means we need to maintain existing code. With Firefox 4's release came news that my MooTools LazyLoad plugin was not intercepting image loading -- the images were loading regardless of...
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!