How can I get an HTML page as a string via PHP?
curl, php
Solution
file_get_contents — Reads entire file into a string
string file_get_contents (
string $filename [, int $flags= 0 [, resource $context [, int $offset= -1 [, int $maxlen= -1 ]]]]
)
from the manual:
This function is similar to file(), except that file_get_contents() returns the file in a string, starting at the specified offset up to maxlen bytes. On failure, file_get_contents() will return FALSE.
file_get_contents() is the preferred way to read the contents of a file into a string. It will use memory mapping techniques if supported by your OS to enhance performance.
And it works both with webpages and files. You can grab the HTML, just by using "http://whatever.com/page.html" as $filename.
Problem
I am fetching some info via PHP from a webpage using `simple_php_dom` and curl. The problem is that the page is not built correctly so the DOM object contains erroneous info. How can I get the HTML file as a string in a PHP var so that I can run a regular expression through it? Curl doesn't work as it is ignoring the bad part. `simple_html_dom.php` has the same issue. `wget` doesn't work since I don't have permissions for it on the server.