How can I download using PHP a XML file redirected in some weird way?

Question

The file which I\'m trying to download from my PHP script is this one:

http://www.navarra.es/appsext/DescargarFichero/default.aspx?codigoAcceso=OpenData&         


        

Answer 1

You dont need cURL, nor file_get_contents to load XML into any of PHP's DOM Based XML parsers.

However, in your particular case, the issue seems to be that the server expects a user agent in the http request. If the user agent is not set in your php.ini, you can use the libxml functions and provide it as a stream context:

libxml_set_streams_context(
    stream_context_create(
        array(
            'http' => array(
                'user_agent' => 'php'            
            )
        )
    )
);

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->load('http://www.navarra.es/app…/Farmacias.xml');
echo $dom->saveXml();

Live Demo

If you dont want to parse the XML file afterwards, you can use file_get_contents as well. You can pass the stream context as the third argument:

echo file_get_contents(
    'http://www.navarra.es/apps…/Farmacias.xml',
    FALSE,
    stream_context_create(
        array(
            'http' => array(
                'user_agent' => 'php'            
            )
        )
    )
);

Live Demo

Answer 2

I have been using the solution given for @Gordon and it was working perfectly in localhost:

$url = "http://www.navarra.es/appsext/DescargarFichero/default.aspx?codigoAcceso=OpenData&fichero=Farmacias/Farmacias.xml";
$file = file_get_contents($url, FALSE, stream_context_create(array('http' =>array('user_agent' => 'php' ))));
$simple = simplexml_load_string($file);

But when I have uploaded all the files to the server... surprise, as always. I started to get the error URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in so I have changed all the file_get_contents() for this code which I have found here:

function get_content($url)
{
$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Googlebot/2.1...");

ob_start();

curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
$string = ob_get_contents();

ob_end_clean();

return $string;
}

Would you think is it a good approach?

Thanks, Pablo.