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HTTP context options

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HTTP context option listing

Description

Context options for http:// and https:// transports.

Options

methodstring

GET, POST, or any other HTTP method supported by the remote server.

Defaults to GET.

headerarray or string

Additional headers to be sent during request. Values in this option will override other values (such as User-agent:, Host:, and Authentication:), even when following Location: redirects. Thus it is not recommended to set a Host: header, if follow_location is enabled.

String value should be Key: value pairs delimited by \r\n, e.g. "Content-Type: application/json\r\nConnection: close". Array value should be a list of Key: value pairs, e.g. ["Content-Type: application/json", "Connection: close"].

user_agentstring

Value to send with User-Agent: header. This value will only be used if user-agent is not specified in the header context option above.

By default the user_agent Ini setting is used.

contentstring

Additional data to be sent after the headers. Typically used with POST or PUT requests.

proxystring

URI specifying address of proxy server (e.g. tcp://proxy.example.com:5100).

request_fulluribool

When set to true, the entire URI will be used when constructing the request (e.g. GET http://www.example.com/path/to/file.html HTTP/1.0). While this is a non-standard request format, some proxy servers require it.

Defaults to false.

follow_locationint

Follow Location header redirects. Set to 0 to disable.

When this option is not set, redirects are only followed for the 300, 301, 302, 303, 307 and 308 response codes. Setting it to 1 is not equivalent: any response carrying a Location header is then followed, whatever its response code.

max_redirectsint

The max number of redirects to follow. Value 1 or less means that no redirects are followed.

Defaults to 20.

protocol_versionfloat

HTTP protocol version.

Defaults to 1.1 as of PHP 8.0.0; prior to that version the default was 1.0.

timeoutfloat

Read timeout in seconds, specified by a float (e.g. 10.5).

By default the default_socket_timeout Ini setting is used.

ignore_errorsbool

Fetch the content even on failure status codes.

Defaults to false.

uri_parser_classstring or null

The class to use for parsing URIs. When null, the legacy behavior based on parse_url() is used. Accepted values are Uri\Rfc3986\Uri (RFC 3986 compliant parser) and Uri\WhatWg\Url (WHATWG URL Standard parser). Custom userland implementations are not supported.

Defaults to null.

Changelog

Version	Description
8.5.0	The `uri_parser_class` option was added.

Examples

Fetch a page and send POST data

php

<?php

$postdata = http_build_query(
    [
        'var1' => 'some content',
        'var2' => 'doh',
    ]
);

$opts = [
    'http' => [
        'method'  => 'POST',
        'header'  => 'Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
        'content' => $postdata,
    ]
];

$context = stream_context_create($opts);

$result = file_get_contents('http://example.com/submit.php', false, $context);

?>

Ignore redirects but fetch headers and content

php

<?php

$url = "http://www.example.org/header.php";

$opts = [
    'http' => [
        'method'        => 'GET',
        'max_redirects' => '0',
        'ignore_errors' => '1',
    ]
];

$context = stream_context_create($opts);
$stream = fopen($url, 'r', false, $context);

// header information as well as meta data
// about the stream
var_dump(stream_get_meta_data($stream));

// actual data at $url
var_dump(stream_get_contents($stream));
fclose($stream);
?>

Notes

Note

Additional context options may be supported by the underlying transport For http:// streams, refer to context options for the tcp:// transport. For https:// streams, refer to context options for the ssl:// transport.

Note

When this stream wrapper follows a redirect, the wrapper_data returned by stream_get_meta_data() might not necessarily contain the HTTP status line that actually applies to the content data at index 0.

output

array (
  'wrapper_data' =>
  array (
    0 => 'HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently',
    1 => 'Cache-Control: no-cache',
    2 => 'Connection: close',
    3 => 'Location: http://example.com/foo.jpg',
    4 => 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK',
    ...

The first request returned a 301 (permanent redirect), so the stream wrapper automatically followed the redirect to get a 200 response (index = 4).