php curl returns 400 Bad Request if does in a loop

Question

I'm trying to do a screen scrape using the cUrl library.

I managed to successfully screen scrape, few urls(5-10).

However whenever i run it in a for loop scraping a bulk(10-20) urls,

it will reach a point the last few urls will returns "HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request". Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
The number of request header fields exceeds this server's limit.

I'm pretty sure the urls are correct and correctly trimmed and the headers length are the same individually. If i put these last few urls on top of the list to scrape, it does go through, but the last few of the list again gets the 400 Bad request error. What could be the problem? What could be the cause?

Any advise ?

Something like below:

for($i=0;$i > sizeof($url);$i++)    
$data[$i] = $this->get($url[$i]); 



function get($url) {

$this->headers[] = 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8, image/gif, image/x-bitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg';
        $this->headers[] = 'Connection: Keep-Alive';
        $this->headers[] = 'Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=UTF-8';
        $this->user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 Firefox/3.6.12 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)';

set_time_limit(EXECUTION_TIME_LIMIT);
        $default_exec_time = ini_get('max_execution_time');

        $this->redirectcount = 0;
        $process = curl_init($url);
        curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $this->headers);
        curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
        curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $this->user_agent);
        if ($this->cookies == TRUE) curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $this->cookie_file);
        if ($this->cookies == TRUE) curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $this->cookie_file);

        //off compression for debugging's sake
        //curl_setopt($process,CURLOPT_ENCODING , $this->compression);

        curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 180);
        if ($this->proxy) curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_PROXY, $this->proxy);
        if ($this->proxyauth){ 
            curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_HTTPPROXYTUNNEL, 1); 
            curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_PROXYUSERPWD, $this->proxyauth);  
         }
        curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
        curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
        curl_setopt($process,CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS,10); 

        //added
        //curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, 1);
        curl_setopt($process,CURLOPT_VERBOSE,TRUE);
        if ($this->referrer) curl_setopt($process,CURLOPT_REFERER,$this->referrer);

        if($this->cookies){
            foreach($this->cookies as $cookie){
                curl_setopt ($process, CURLOPT_COOKIE, $cookie);
                //echo $cookie; 
            }
        }

        $return = $this->redirect_exec($process);//curl_exec($process) or curl_error($process);
        curl_close($process);
        set_time_limit($default_exec_time);//setback to default

        return $return;
    }

    function redirect_exec($ch, $curlopt_header = false) {

    //curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
    //curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    $data = curl_exec($ch);
    $file = fopen(DP_SCRAPE_DATA_CURL_DIR.$this->redirectcount.".html","w");
    fwrite($file,$data);
    fclose($file);

    $info =    curl_getinfo($ch);
    print_r($info);echo "
";

    $http_code = $info['http_code'];
    if ($http_code == 301 || $http_code == 302 || $http_code == 303) {
        //list($header) = explode("\r\n\r\n", $data);
        //print_r($header);
        $matches = array();
        //print_r($data);

        //Check if the response has a Location to redirect to
        preg_match('/(Location:|URI:)(.*?)\n/', $data, $matches);
        $url = trim(array_pop($matches));
        //print_r($url);
        $url_parsed = parse_url($url);
        //print_r($url_parsed);
        if (isset($url_parsed['path']) && isset($url) && !empty($url) ) {
            //echo "
".$url;
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, MY_HOST.$url);
            //echo "
".$url;
            $this->redirectcount++;
            return $this->redirect_exec($ch);
            //return $this->get(MY_HOST.$url); //$this->redirect_exec($ch);
        }
    }

    elseif($http_code == 200){
        $matches = array();
        preg_match('/(/i', $data, $matches);
        //print_r($matches);
        $url = trim(array_pop($matches));
        //print_r($url);
        $url_parsed = parse_url($url);
        //print_r($url_parsed);
        if (isset($url_parsed['path']) && isset($url) && !empty($url) ) {
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
            //echo "
".$url;
            $this->redirectcount++;
            sleep(SLEEP_INTERVAL);
            return $this->redirect_exec($ch);
            //return $this->get($url); //$this->redirect_exec($ch);
        }
    }
    //echo "data ".$data;
    $this->redirectcount++;

    return  $data ; // $info['url'];
    } 

where $urls are all the urls containing all query string for a get request

i realised from curl_getinfo , the [request_size ] is getting larger and larger which it shouldnt be.. it should be about the same size. How can i print/echo my http request information to debug?

Answer 1

Your problem regarding the multiplying headers is at the top of the get method:

$this->headers[] = 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8, image/gif, image/x-bitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg';
$this->headers[] = 'Connection: Keep-Alive';
$this->headers[] = 'Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=UTF-8';

On each iteration you are adding the same headers to the headers array of the object instance. (Saying array[] appends to the array.) You need to either reset the array on each iteration or perhaps move the headers setting into another method.

If headers is always and only set in the get method, you can change it to this in order to fix the problem:

$this->headers = array(
    'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8, image/gif, image/x-bitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg',
    'Connection: Keep-Alive',
    'Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=UTF-8'
);

...but if the headers are always the same and never changed between iterations, you might as well set the headers' value in the object constructor and only read from it in the get method, since resetting the array to the same value all the time is redundant.