How to use wget in php?

Question

I have this parameters to download a XML file:

wget --http-user=user --http-password=pass http://www.example.com/file.xml 

How I have to use that in php to open this xml file?

Answer 1

wget

wget is a linux command, not a PHP command, so to run this you woud need to use exec, which is a PHP command for executing shell commands.

exec("wget --http-user=[user] --http-password=[pass] http://www.example.com/file.xml"); 

This can be useful if you are downloading a large file - and would like to monitor the progress, however when working with pages in which you are just interested in the content, there are simple functions for doing just that.

The exec function is enabled by default, but may be disabled in some situations. The configuration options for this reside in your php.ini, to enable, remove exec from the disabled_functions config string.

alternative

Using file_get_contents we can retrieve the contents of the specified URL/URI. When you just need to read the file into a variable, this would be the perfect function to use as a replacement for curl - follow the URI syntax when building your URL.

// standard url $content = file_get_contents("http://www.example.com/file.xml");  // or with basic auth $content = file_get_contents("http://user:[email protected]/file.xml"); 

As noted by Sean the Bean - you may also need to change allow_url_fopen to true in your php.ini to allow the use of a URL in this method, however, this should be true by default.

If you want to then store that file locally, there is a function file_put_contents to write that into a file, combined with the previous, this could emulate a file download:

file_put_contents("local_file.xml", $content);