Returning html as a string in PHP

Question

When I use CocoaRestClient to submit a GET on an HTML website it will return the source for the site. How can I return the same thing as a string (or something to convert into a string or parse) in php? I've tried using

    echo $_GET[$url];

but it does not seem to return anything.

Note: the string returned will probably be rather large.

Did you mean echo $_GET["url"]? Note however that there are limits on how big a GET parameter can be (about 1-2k) — Pekka
– Pekka, Commented Feb 17, 2013 at 18:28

Jon · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-17 18:29:11Z

3

If you are asking about how to make an HTTP request from PHP and get the response as a string, for the simplest cases you can use file_get_contents:

$html = file_get_contents('http://www.google.com');

If you want to do something more configurable then you have to go with curl.

answered Feb 17, 2013 at 18:29

Jon

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2 Comments

JuJoDi Over a year ago

This is exactly what I was looking for thank you. On to figuring out the next step! Also, looking into curl to see if that's more of what I need. Thank you sir.

grepsedawk Over a year ago

@JuJoDi, if this answer was what you're looking for, please mark as best answer.

Community · Accepted Answer · 2023-11-17 20:13:27Z

0

Do you want to prevent sending the source to the visitor's browser and get it as a string instead? You can use output buffer.

Put this line at the beginning of your code:

ob_start();

From now on everything that would normally be sent to the browser will be buffered instead. To end buffering and get contents use:

$out = ob_get_contents();    // this will only get the contents
$out = ob_get_clean();       // this will also empty the buffer

To stop buffering:

ob_end_clean();              // will just stop buffering
ob_end_flush();              // will also echo() current buffer

Output buffer docs here.

edited Nov 17, 2023 at 20:13

CommunityBot

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answered Feb 17, 2013 at 18:38

gronostaj

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