The power of file_get_contents

With recent PHP versions, using file_get_contents() is a very efficient method to get and parse stuff from the web $vHeaders = "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5\r\n"; $vHeaders .= "Accept-language: en\r\n"; $vHeaders .= "Cookie: PHPSESSID=".$vSomeID."\r\n"; $vOpts = array('http'=> array('method'=>"GET",'header'=>$vHeaders) ); $vContext = stream_context_create($opts); $vURL = 'https://private.example.com'; $vPage = file_get_contents($vURL,FALSE,$vContext); You could set headers like custom user-agent string, cookie variables, just like a "real" browser.