Download a Remote File Using PHP

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9/29/2005

Download a Remote File Using PHP

On hosts with safe_mode turned on, it can be difficult to get remote files with a system call to wget or curl. Here is a PHP function that will get a file with an HTTP GET. I use it to download remote images. It returns the binary data in a variable that can be written to a file.

<?php
function http_get_file($url) {

$url_stuff = parse_url($url);
$port = isset($url_stuff['port']) ? $url_stuff['port']:80;

$fp = fsockopen($url_stuff['host'], $port);

$query = 'GET ' . $url_stuff['path'] . " HTTP/1.0\n";
$query .= 'Host: ' . $url_stuff['host'];
$query .= "\n\n";

fwrite($fp, $query);

while ($line = fread($fp, 1024)) {
$buffer .= $line;
}

preg_match('/Content-Length: ([0-9]+)/', $buffer, $parts);
return substr($buffer, - $parts[1]);
}
?>

Original function found on php.net

Popularity: 41%

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3 Responses to “Download a Remote File Using PHP”

How to download a remote file in php and then save it | HumanUmbrella.com said:
December 8th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
[…] it from -> this site […]

Bala Krishna said:
March 29th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
What about 2GB file download. I don’t think $buffer variable is able to handle this much of binary data and then save later on disk.. do you have any idea about this.. please share..