Server configuration by allow_url_fopen=0 in

Solution 1:

@blytung Has a nice function to replace that function

<?php
$url = "http://www.example.org/";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$contents = curl_exec($ch);
if (curl_errno($ch)) {
  echo curl_error($ch);
  echo "\n<br />";
  $contents = '';
} else {
  curl_close($ch);
}

if (!is_string($contents) || !strlen($contents)) {
echo "Failed to get contents.";
$contents = '';
}

echo $contents;
?>    

Solution 2:

If you do not have the ability to modify your php.ini file, use cURL: PHP Curl And Cookies

Here is an example function I created:

function get_web_page( $url, $cookiesIn = '' ){
        $options = array(
            CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,     // return web page
            CURLOPT_HEADER         => true,     //return headers in addition to content
            CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,     // follow redirects
            CURLOPT_ENCODING       => "",       // handle all encodings
            CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER    => true,     // set referer on redirect
            CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 120,      // timeout on connect
            CURLOPT_TIMEOUT        => 120,      // timeout on response
            CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS      => 10,       // stop after 10 redirects
            CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT    => true,
            CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => true,     // Validate SSL Cert
            CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION   => CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1,
            CURLOPT_COOKIE         => $cookiesIn
        );

        $ch      = curl_init( $url );
        curl_setopt_array( $ch, $options );
        $rough_content = curl_exec( $ch );
        $err     = curl_errno( $ch );
        $errmsg  = curl_error( $ch );
        $header  = curl_getinfo( $ch );
        curl_close( $ch );

        $header_content = substr($rough_content, 0, $header['header_size']);
        $body_content = trim(str_replace($header_content, '', $rough_content));
        $pattern = "#Set-Cookie:\\s+(?<cookie>[^=]+=[^;]+)#m"; 
        preg_match_all($pattern, $header_content, $matches); 
        $cookiesOut = implode("; ", $matches['cookie']);

        $header['errno']   = $err;
        $header['errmsg']  = $errmsg;
        $header['headers']  = $header_content;
        $header['content'] = $body_content;
        $header['cookies'] = $cookiesOut;
    return $header;
}

NOTE: In revisiting this function I noticed that I had disabled SSL checks in this code. That is generally a BAD thing even though in my particular case the site I was using it on was local and was safe. As a result I've modified this code to have SSL checks on by default. If for some reason you need to change that, you can simply update the value for CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, but I wanted the code to be secure by default if someone uses this.