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!
![39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla]()
In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...
![Welcome to My New Office]()
My first professional web development was at a small print shop where I sat in a windowless cubical all day. I suffered that boxed in environment for almost five years before I was able to find a remote job where I worked from home. The first...
![Fancy Navigation with MooTools JavaScript]()
Navigation menus are traditionally boring, right? Most of the time the navigation menu consists of some imagery with a corresponding mouseover image. Where's the originality? I've created a fancy navigation menu that highlights navigation items and creates a chain effect.
The XHTML
Just some simple...
![Create GitHub-Style Buttons with CSS and jQuery, MooTools, or Dojo JavaScript]()
I'm what you would consider a bit of a GitHub fanboy. We all know that GitHub is the perfect place to store repositories of open source code, but I think my love of GitHub goes beyond that. GitHub seems to understand that most...
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!