PHP file_get_contents() returns "failed to open stream: HTTP request failed!"

Question

I am having problems calling a url from PHP code. I need to call a service using a query string from my PHP code. If I type the url into a browser, it works ok, but if I use file-get-contents() to make the call, I get:

Warning: file-get-contents(http://.... ) failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 202 Accepted in ...

The code I am using is:

$query=file_get_contents('http://###.##.##.##/mp/get?mpsrc=http://mybucket.s3.amazonaws.com/11111.mpg&mpaction=convert format=flv');
echo($query);

Like I said - call from the browser and it works fine. Any suggestions?

I have also tried with another url such as:

$query=file_get_contents('http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiFrfeJ8dKM');

This works fine... could it be that the url I need to call has a second http:// in it?

Answer 1

Try using cURL.

<?php

$curl_handle=curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL,'http://###.##.##.##/mp/get?mpsrc=http://mybucket.s3.amazonaws.com/11111.mpg&mpaction=convert format=flv');
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Your application name');
$query = curl_exec($curl_handle);
curl_close($curl_handle);

?>

Answer 2

Could this be your problem?

Note: If you're opening a URI with special characters, such as spaces, you need to encode the URI with urlencode().

Answer 3

<?php

$lurl=get_fcontent("http://ip2.cc/?api=cname&ip=84.228.229.81");
echo"cid:".$lurl[0]."<BR>";


function get_fcontent( $url,  $javascript_loop = 0, $timeout = 5 ) {
    $url = str_replace( "&amp;", "&", urldecode(trim($url)) );

    $cookie = tempnam ("/tmp", "CURLCOOKIE");
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1" );
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url );
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie );
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true );
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, "" );
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true );
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true );
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false );    # required for https urls
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout );
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $timeout );
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 10 );
    $content = curl_exec( $ch );
    $response = curl_getinfo( $ch );
    curl_close ( $ch );

    if ($response['http_code'] == 301 || $response['http_code'] == 302) {
        ini_set("user_agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1");

        if ( $headers = get_headers($response['url']) ) {
            foreach( $headers as $value ) {
                if ( substr( strtolower($value), 0, 9 ) == "location:" )
                    return get_url( trim( substr( $value, 9, strlen($value) ) ) );
            }
        }
    }

    if (    ( preg_match("/>[[:space:]]+window\.location\.replace\('(.*)'\)/i", $content, $value) || preg_match("/>[[:space:]]+window\.location\=\"(.*)\"/i", $content, $value) ) && $javascript_loop < 5) {
        return get_url( $value[1], $javascript_loop+1 );
    } else {
        return array( $content, $response );
    }
}


?>

Answer 4

file_get_contents() utilizes the fopen() wrappers, therefore it is restricted from accessing URLs through the allow_url_fopen option within php.ini.

You will either need to alter your php.ini to turn this option on or use an alternative method, namely cURL - by far the most popular and, to be honest, standard way to accomplish what you are trying to do.

Answer 5

You basically are required to send some information with the request.

Try this,

$opts = array('http'=>array('header' => "User-Agent:MyAgent/1.0\r\n")); 
//Basically adding headers to the request
$context = stream_context_create($opts);
$html = file_get_contents($url,false,$context);
$html = htmlspecialchars($html);

This worked out for me

Answer 6

I notice that your URL has spaces in it. I think that usually is a bad thing. Try encoding the URL with

$my_url = urlencode("my url");

and then calling

file_get_contents($my_url);

and see if you have better luck.

Answer 7

I got a similar problem.

Due to timeout !

Timeout can be indicated like this :

$options = array(
    'http' => array(
        'header'  => "Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n",
        'method'  => "POST",
        'content' => http_build_query($data2),
        'timeout' => 30,
    ),
);
$context = stream_context_create($options);
$retour = @file_get_contents("http://xxxxx.xxx/xxxx", false, $context);

Answer 8

I got a similar problem , I parsed the youtube url. The code is;

$json_is = "http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?q=".$this->video_url."&max-results=1&alt=json";
$video_info = json_decode ( file_get_contents ( $json_is ), true );     
$video_title = is_array ( $video_info ) ? $video_info ['feed'] ['entry'] [0] ['title'] ['$t'] : '';

Then I realise that $this->video_url include the whitespace. I solved that using trim($this->video_url).

Maybe it will help you . Good Luck

Answer 9

$query=file_get_contents('http://###.##.##.##/mp/get?' . http_build_query(array('mpsrc' => 'http://mybucket.s3.amazonaws.com/11111.mpg&mpaction=convert format=flv')));

Answer 10

I'm not sure about the parameters(mpaction, format), if they are specified for the amazonaws page or ##.##.

Try to urlencode() the url.

Answer 11

This function solved my problem

function file_get_contents_curl($url) {
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); //Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $data;
}

Answer 12

This wasn't working for me and I was getting a null value for the result query. So I checked on postman to see if the api was actually returning values and it was. Post man has this tab on the right where you can get sample code that was used to get the results and after trying that it finally worked, but initially you might get a weird error 411 saying the post length needs to be specified I added the fix in my code below. To bypass the 411 POST length error create an empty array and use the http_build_query function. Then set that variable in the CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS curl option.

$data_string = array();
$curl = curl_init();
$test = http_build_query($data_string);
curl_setopt_array($curl, array(
CURLOPT_URL => 'https://www.googleapis.com/geolocation/v1/geolocate?key=APIKEY',
CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => $test,
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
CURLOPT_ENCODING => '',
CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10,
CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 0,
CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,
CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION => CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1,
CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST => 'POST',
));

$response = curl_exec($curl);

curl_close($curl);
echo $response;

Answer 13

This is what worked for me... I did not use curl.

I was able to access a particular API url via browser, but when used in file_get_contents, it gave the error " failed to open stream".

Then, I modified the API URL that I wanted to call by encoding all double quotes with urlencoding and kept everything else untouched.

Sample format is given below:

$url = 'https://stackoverflow.com/questions'.urlencode('"'.$variable1.'"');

Then use

file_get_contents($url);

Answer 14

Had same issue but it was a firewall issue... once I had the API server whitelisted, it worked fine, using both get_file_contents($url) and the curl method above...

hours wasted before discovering the firewall rule issue.

Answer 15

For me the problem was an incorrect value in the Content-Length header. The value was too great, so nginx kept waiting for the rest of the content that never arrived.

Answer 16

Use this

file_get_contents($my_url,null,null);