Php/docs/features.remote-files
Using remote files
As long as allow_url_fopen is enabled in
php.ini, you can use HTTP and FTP
URLs with most of the functions
that take a filename as a parameter. In addition, URLs can be
used with the include,
include_once, require and
require_once statements (since PHP 5.2.0,
allow_url_include must be enabled for these).
See Supported Protocols and Wrappers for more information about the protocols
supported by PHP.
For example, you can use this to open a file on a remote web server, parse the output for the data you want, and then use that data in a database query, or simply to output it in a style matching the rest of your website.
Example #1 Getting the title of a remote page
<?php$file = fopen ("http://www.example.com/%22, "r");if (!$file) { echo "<p>Unable to open remote file.\n"; exit;}while (!feof ($file)) { $line = fgets ($file, 1024); /* This only works if the title and its tags are on one line */ if (preg_match ("@\<title\>(.*)\</title\>@i", $line, $out)) { $title = $out[1]; break; }}fclose($file);?>
You can also write to files on an FTP server (provided that you have connected as a user with the correct access rights). You can only create new files using this method; if you try to overwrite a file that already exists, the fopen() call will fail.
To connect as a user other than 'anonymous', you need to specify
the username (and possibly password) within the URL, such as
'ftp://user:[email protected]/path/to/file'.
(You can use the same sort of syntax to access files via
HTTP when they require Basic authentication.)
Example #2 Storing data on a remote server
<?php$file = fopen ("ftp://ftp.example.com/incoming/outputfile%22, "w");if (!$file) { echo "<p>Unable to open remote file for writing.\n"; exit;}/* Write the data here. */fwrite ($file, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] . "\n");fclose ($file);?>
Note:
You might get the idea from the example above that you can use this technique to write to a remote log file. Unfortunately that would not work because the fopen() call will fail if the remote file already exists. To do distributed logging like that, you should take a look at syslog().
