fopen() unable to open some URLs?

Hi,

I've used fopen() extensively to open web pages. I've found that there is a
small minority
of web pages that open fine in a browser, but are inaccessible using
fopen(). Here are
two such URLs:

http://www.homes.com/
http://www.dolbyproperties.com/

For example, using the code below, almost every web page that will open in a
browser
will be read correctly by this code. There are few exceptions, such as the
above URLs.
I'm wondering why/how could a page be accessible to a browser but not to
fopen()?

Here's the code:

<?php

$page = "";

if (isset($url))
{
$fp = fopen($url, 'r');

if ($fp != false)
{
while (feof($fp) == false)
{
$page .= fread($fp, 10000);
}

fclose($fp);

echo "URL: $url =====================================<br><br>";
echo $page;
}
}

?>

I have this code running with a simple form interface here:

http://linkmachine.net/fopen_test.php

Any ideas?

Thank you,

-Michael

re: fopen() unable to open some URLs?

Michael Ferrier wrote:[color=blue]
> For example, using the code below, almost every web page that will
> open in a browser
> will be read correctly by this code. There are few exceptions, such
> as the above URLs.
> I'm wondering why/how could a page be accessible to a browser but not
> to fopen()?
>[/color]

Some websites require an explicit user-agent header in order to return a
response, as is the case with homes.com

There are several ways to include the user agent, of which the easiest is to
apply the ini_set function as follows:

ini_set('user_agent','Mozilla');
$fp = fopen('http://www.homes.com/','r');
fpassthru($fp);

When you run this code, you will see it works fine for homes.com. Bare in
mind that this doesn't work for sites which require more then a user agent
string to operate.

JW