use fopen to parse a remote file that uses a cookie

I have been playing about with parsing remote files recently and managed to parse a file to get the latest lottery results which works great.

Now I would like to parse the same page that is shown when you visit http://www.virtualworlddirect.com/g.asp?m=28917 so I can extract the name showing in the red bar.

I used the normal fopen and fgets to read each line into a buffer and check for a particular set of characters using strstr but the file that is fetched by the script doesn't contain the "Andy B(TheEmpireGroup.co.uk) Welcomes You" red bar.

I think this is probably due to the fact that when a user surfs the page they get a cookie downloaded and then shown a page for that cookie owner. (it's an affiliate site). As the php is on a separate site, it doesn't get the cookie and so gets shown the page without any affiliate identification. (once you have a cookie on your computer, it doesn't show the page without affiliate identification)

question is, how do I use php to parse the page as the user would see it? would it require some code to get the cookie first?

Andy

 

http://es.php.net/curl

 

thanks for that, I thought it might be something to do with being curly!

$ch = curl_init("http://www.virtualworlddirect.com/vwdguest/default.asp?rq=0.6251795&m=28917");
$fp = fopen("example_homepage.txt", "w");

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
fclose($fp);

Code (markup):

I had to change the url because the text file orginally contained a message saying " this file exists at .."
Now I have done that, the text file still doesn't contain the "And B.." bit.

which curly bits am I missing?

Andy