read webpage content in to a variable

read web content via a weblink like

http://www.site.com/?id=123

what is the correct way to do this?

You could do it like this:
<?php

$file = "http://www.example.com";

$handle = fopen($file, "r");
$contents = '';
while (!feof($handle)) {
$contents .= fread($handle, 8192);
}
fclose($handle);

// $contents will now contain the contents of the file

?>

It's not been tested, but try it? I've basically pulled it from the PHP manual.

The only problem with doing it this way is you want to get the filesize of the file to read to tell the fread() (http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.fread.php) function the size of file. Like so


$contents .= fread($handle, filesize($file));


However filesize() (http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.filesize.php) doesn't work on files that are not hosted on the same server that the script is running on. For instance i can get $filesize("my_file.txt") if my_file.txt is hosted on my server, but I can't get $filesize("http://www.example.com")

A better way to do this is using the file_get_contents() (http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.file-get-contents.php) function. Does the same thing but doesn't require to know the size of the file and is smaller code :)


<?PHP
$contents='';
$contents.=file_get_contents("http://www.example.com");
echo $contents;
?>