file_get_contents returns 403 forbidden

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I know it’s quite an old thread but thought of sharing some ideas.

Most likely if you don’t get any content while accessing an webpage, probably it doesn’t want you to be able to get the content. So how does it identify that a script is trying to access the webpage, not a human? Generally, it is the User-Agent header in the HTTP request sent to the server.

So to make the website think that the script accessing the webpage is also a human you must change the User-Agent header during the request. Most web servers would likely allow your request if you set the User-Agent header to an value which is used by some common web browser.

A list of common user agents used by browsers are listed below:

  • Chrome: 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.102 Safari/537.36'

  • Firefox: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:75.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/75.0

  • etc…

$context = stream_context_create(
    array(
        "http" => array(
            "header" => "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.102 Safari/537.36"
        )
    )
);

echo file_get_contents("www.google.com", false, $context);

This piece of code, fakes the user agent and sends the request to https://google.com.

References:

Cheers!

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