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!
![5 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About]()
CSS and JavaScript: the lines seemingly get blurred by each browser release. They have always done a very different job but in the end they are both front-end technologies so they need do need to work closely. We have our .js files and our .css, but...
![CSS Animations Between Media Queries]()
CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...
![CSS Scoped Styles]()
There are plenty of awesome new attributes we've gotten during the HTML5 revolution: placeholder, download, hidden, and more. Each of these attributes provides us a different level of control over an element on the page, but there's a new element attribute that allows...
![Implementing Basic and Fancy Show/Hide in MooTools 1.2]()
One of the great parts of MooTools is that the library itself allows for maximum flexibility within its provided classes. You can see evidence of this in the "Class" class' implement method. Using the implement method, you can add your own methods to...
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!