How to read COOKIES from text file PHP

Question

I have used CURL with PHP, please check the below code

$cookie = "cookies.txt";
file_put_contents($cookie, "");
$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookie);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$response = curl_exec($ch);

After that I opened the cookies.txt file, in that the cookies are stored.

Now how do I read that file to get required content.

I have tried to read the file using readfile file_get_contents but no use at all, these are just returning empty string.

Please help me out.

Thanks in advance

From that file i need to get 2 particular cookies and set that values with different cookie names. — Sathvik Chinnu, Jul 17 '16 at 11:17
I have set after `$response` line $get = file_get_contents($cookie); — Sathvik Chinnu, Jul 17 '16 at 11:18
Anyway, you should be able to read the file with `file_get_contents`, if you get an empty string, then the file is maybe empty? — Charlotte Dunois, Jul 17 '16 at 11:18
But I am able to see the text in cookie.txt file @CharlotteDunois — Sathvik Chinnu, Jul 17 '16 at 11:19
I am not able to understand what you are saying. Can you be more clear @QuỳnhNguyễn — Sathvik Chinnu, Jul 17 '16 at 11:20
@SathvikChinnu Are you try file_get_contents("cookies.txt"); ? — Quynh Nguyen, Jul 17 '16 at 11:20
Are you sure it's an empty string you get? Is error reporting enabled? — Charlotte Dunois, Jul 17 '16 at 11:20
@SathvikChinnu It mean you can create more cookies file with another name by time() in file name — Quynh Nguyen, Jul 17 '16 at 11:21
Does it work if you pause before reading? For example add `sleep(10)` (a 10 second pause) after the CURL before you try to read the file. Just for testing. — BeetleJuice, Jul 17 '16 at 11:27
Yeah i am just readin it in this way only ` file_get_contents("cookies.txt");` — Sathvik Chinnu, Jul 17 '16 at 11:30
No even `sleep(10)` is not working still the same @BeetleJuice — Sathvik Chinnu, Jul 17 '16 at 11:33
No not working @BeetleJuice.. I think I may have doing some wrong. I will send the link contains complete code — Sathvik Chinnu, Jul 17 '16 at 12:04
Actually if I write `$cookie_text = file_get_contents("cookies.txt");` outside the `curl_close($ch);` code then it is working fine but I want to get the code before `curl_close($ch);` — Sathvik Chinnu, Jul 17 '16 at 12:42
As I wrote in my answer, CURL writes to the file only at the end of its session, so you won't be able to read the cookies from the file before you close the connection. In my answer I gave you an alternative approach though that should still work. — BeetleJuice, Jul 17 '16 at 13:01

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:14

CURL writes the cookies to file at the end of its session. Your problem could be that you're accessing the cookie file before CURL has written the cookies.

The possible fix is to end the CURL session before you try to read from the cookie file:

curl_easy_cleanup($ch);
...
$cookie_text = file_get_contents("cookies.txt");

See the docs.

As a clean alternative, just grab the cookies from the response directly, without going through the cookies.txt file. The code below will put the cookies in an array for you:

preg_match_all('/^Set-Cookie:\s*([^;]*)/mi', $response, $matches);
$cookies = array();
foreach($matches[1] as $item) {
    parse_str($item, $cookie);
    $cookies = array_merge($cookies, $cookie);
}

Code taken from this accepted answer:

How to read COOKIES from text file PHP

1 Answers1