How to disguise your PHP script as a browser?

Question

We've been using information from a site for a while now (something that the site allows if you mention the source and we do) and we've been copying the information by hand. As you could imagine this can become tedious pretty fast so I've been trying to automate the process by fetching the information with a PHP script.

The URL I'm trying to fetch is:

http://mediaforest.ro/weeklycharts/viewchart.aspx?r=WeeklyChartRadioLocal&y=2010&w=46 08-11-10 14-11-10

If I enter it in a browser it works, if I try a file_get_contents() I get Bad Request

I figured that they checked to see if the client is a browser so I rolled a CURL based solution:

$ch = curl_init();

$header=array(
  'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 Firefox/3.6.12',
  'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
  'Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5',
  'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate',
  'Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7',
  'Keep-Alive: 115',
  'Connection: keep-alive',
);

curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE,'cookies.txt');
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR,'cookies.txt');
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER,$header);
$result=curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

I've checked and the headers are identical with my browser's headers and I still get Bad Request

So I tried another solution:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-setopt.php#78046

Unfortunately this doesn't work either and I'm out of ideas. What am I missing?

Answer 1

Try escaping your URL, it works for me that way.

http://mediaforest.ro/weeklycharts/viewchart.aspx?r=WeeklyChartRadioLocal&y=2010&w=46%2008-11-10%2014-11-10

Answer 2

Use curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 Firefox/3.6.12');

You can replace the useragent with another one of course.

However, "Bad Request" is most likely NOT related to a missing/bad useragent. It sounds like the webserver itself doesn't like your request.. not the application behind the requested URI.