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!
![I’m an Impostor]()
This is the hardest thing I've ever had to write, much less admit to myself. I've written resignation letters from jobs I've loved, I've ended relationships, I've failed at a host of tasks, and let myself down in my life. All of those feelings were very...
![CSS Filters]()
CSS filter support recently landed within WebKit nightlies. CSS filters provide a method for modifying the rendering of a basic DOM element, image, or video. CSS filters allow for blurring, warping, and modifying the color intensity of elements. Let's have...
![“Top” Watermark Using MooTools]()
Whenever you have a long page worth of content, you generally want to add a "top" anchor link at the bottom of the page so that your user doesn't have to scroll forever to get to the top. The only problem with this method is...
![Create Spinning, Fading Icons with CSS3 and MooTools]()
A goal of my latest blog redesign was to practice what I preached a bit more; add a bit more subtle flair. One of the ways I accomplished that was by using CSS3 animations to change the display of my profile icons (RSS, GitHub, etc.) I...
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!