Reading a Remote file using PHP

There are several way to read a remote file from php but we will discuss 3 ways:

1.fopen
2. Use file_get_contents()
2. CURL

1 . Using fopen()

If you use fopen() to read a remote file the process is as simple as reading from a local file. The only difference is that you will specify the URL instead of the file name. Take a look at the example below :

<?php
     $file = fopen ( "http://www.google.com" , "r" );
$site = fread ( $file , 200000 );
fclose ( $file );
     print $site ;
?>

2. Using file_get_contents()

This is very simple way to reading a remote file. Just call this function and specify a url as the parameter. But make sure you remember to check the return value first to determine if it return an error before processing the result

$content = file_get_contents('http://www.google.com/');
if ($content !== false) {
    echo $content
} else {
echo "Invalid URL"
}

3. CURL

The function needs to be called by providing the URL for the resource you need and it will retrieve the resource's content.

Example of usage :

$content = getFile('http://google.com');

and the function itself :

function getFile($url){
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$tmp = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
if ($tmp != false){
return $tmp;
}

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