How to let Curl use same cookie as the browser from PHP

Question

I have a PHP script that does an HTTP request on behalf of the browser and the outputs the response to the browser. Problem is when I click the links from the browser on this page it complains about cookie variables. I'm assuming it needs the browsers cookie(s) for the site.

how can I intercept and forward it to the remote site?

Answer 1

This is how I forward all browser cookies to curl and also return all cookies for the curl request back to the browser. For this I needed to solve some problems like getting cookies from curl, parsing http header, sending multiple cookies and session locking:

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

// get http header for cookies
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);

// forward current cookies to curl
$cookies = array();
foreach ($_COOKIE as $key => $value)
{
    if ($key != 'Array')
    {
        $cookies[] = $key . '=' . $value;
    }
}
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_COOKIE, implode(';', $cookies) );

// Stop session so curl can use the same session without conflicts
session_write_close();

$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

// Session restart
session_start();

// Seperate header and body
list($header, $body) = explode("\r\n\r\n", $response, 2);

// extract cookies form curl and forward them to browser
preg_match_all('/^(Set-Cookie:\s*[^\n]*)$/mi', $header, $cookies);
foreach($cookies[0] AS $cookie)
{
     header($cookie, false);
}

echo $body;