file_get_contents returns 403 forbidden

Question

I am trying to make a sitescraper. I made it on my local machine and it works very fine there. When I execute the same on my server, it shows a 403 forbidden error. I am using the PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser. The error I get on the server is this:

Warning: file_get_contents(http://example.com/viewProperty.html?id=7715888) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden in /home/scraping/simple_html_dom.php on line 40

The line of code triggering it is:

$url="http://www.example.com/viewProperty.html?id=".$id;  $html=file_get_html($url); 

I have checked the php.ini on the server and allow_url_fopen is On. Possible solution can be using curl, but I need to know where I am going wrong.

Answer 1

I know it's quite an old thread but thought of sharing some ideas.

Most likely if you don't get any content while accessing an webpage, probably it doesn't want you to be able to get the content. So how does it identify that a script is trying to access the webpage, not a human? Generally, it is the User-Agent header in the HTTP request sent to the server.

So to make the website think that the script accessing the webpage is also a human you must change the User-Agent header during the request. Most web servers would likely allow your request if you set the User-Agent header to an value which is used by some common web browser.

A list of common user agents used by browsers are listed below:

• Chrome: 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.102 Safari/537.36'

• Firefox: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:75.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/75.0

• etc...

---

$context = stream_context_create(     array(         "http" => array(             "header" => "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.102 Safari/537.36"         )     ) );  echo file_get_contents("www.google.com", false, $context); 

This piece of code, fakes the user agent and sends the request to https://google.com.

References:

• stream_context_create

Cheers!

Answer 2

This is not a problem with your script, but with the resource you are requesting. The web server is returning the "forbidden" status code.

It could be that it blocks PHP scripts to prevent scraping, or your IP if you have made too many requests.

You should probably talk to the administrator of the remote server.