php get request returns empty

Question

file_get_contents returns an empty string on the url: http://thepiratebay.org/search/a

when it is obviosly not empty. also tried curl, heres my code

$ch = curl_init();
$cookieFile = 'cookies.txt';
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookieFile);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookieFile);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 30);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)');

$url = 'http://thepiratebay.org/search/a';
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);

$html = curl_exec ($ch);
var_dump($html);
$html = file_get_contents($url);
var_dump($html);

curl_close ($ch); unset($ch);

output is :

string(143) "HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.8
Content-type: text/html
Content-Length: 0
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:27:01 GMT
Server: lighttpd

"
string(0) ""

if i change the url to "http://thepiratebay.org/search" by deleting 2 chars everything is ok and i get a good response.

any ideas ?

Community · Accepted Answer · 2023-11-17 19:22:09Z

2

The problem is that you're trying to set the user-agent string using CURLOPT_TIMEOUT. Try using CURLOPT_USERAGENT and that should solve your problem. You can do the same time using a stream_context_create or ini_set if you'd rather use file_get_contents.

Example for all three techniques are available at http://www.seopher.com/articles/how_to_change_your_php_user_agent_to_avoid_being_blocked_when_using_curl.

edited Nov 17, 2023 at 19:22

CommunityBot

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answered Nov 14, 2011 at 20:36

Francois Deschenes

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1 Comment

Legion Over a year ago

lolz, stupid mistake, ty, it was the CURLOPT_USERAGENT, i ended up writing this in python :)

John Watson · Accepted Answer · 2011-11-14 20:39:50Z

0

file_get_contents may not be able to open URLs in your install. See fopen_wrappers. Or thepiratebay.org may be blocking you because of the user-agent on the file_get_contents call. Try passing a context. Or maybe it isn't returning anything because you aren't sending any cookies in your file_get_contents call like you are with curl. Bottom line, even though the URLs are the same, the requests are different.

answered Nov 14, 2011 at 20:39

John Watson

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