PHP cURL Cookies Example

Posted by Mike Lopez under PHP cURL

May 2008

01:01pm

Want to learn how to use PHP cURL with Cookies? Well, it’s pretty simple so let’s go see the code but first let’s make a scenario…

Say we have a page called ‘cookiepage.php’ in a particular website that checks for the cookie set by the homepage and will only return the proper output if the cookie exists. How do you do it? Here’s how…

<?php
/* STEP 1. let’s create a cookie file */
$ckfile = tempnam ("/tmp", "CURLCOOKIE");

/* STEP 2. visit the homepage to set the cookie properly */
$ch = curl_init ("http://somedomain.com/");
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $ckfile);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$output = curl_exec ($ch);

/* STEP 3. visit cookiepage.php */
$ch = curl_init ("http://somedomain.com/cookiepage.php");
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $ckfile);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$output = curl_exec ($ch);

/* here you can do whatever you want with $output */
?>

Just in case you weren’t able to catch what we did in the above example, here’s a short explanation.

STEP 1 creates a temporary cookie file using the tempnam() function.
STEP 2 loads the homepage and saves the cookie in our temporary cookie file. The key here is this line:
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $ckfile);
STEP 3 loads cookiepage.php with the saved cookie with this line:
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $ckfile);

Sleek and simple ei? Hope this PHP cURL Cookie example helped you out!

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