Question 180800 in PHP Question posted in
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PHP function file_get_contents($url) returns special characters

I am trying to retrieve the meta data for a given links (url). I have implemented the following steps:

$url = "url is here";
$html = file_get_contents($url);
$crawler = new Crawler($html); // Symfony library
$description = $crawler->filterXPath("//meta[@name='description']")->extract(['content']);

Doing so, I manage to retrieve the meta data for some urls but not for all.
Some urls, the file_get_contents($url) function returns special characters like (x1F‹x08x00x00x00x00x00x04x03ì½}{ãÆ‘/ú÷øSÀœ’x1E)! ‘z§¬qlÇI……….) that is why I could not retrieve the meta data.

Notice that, I am using the same website for $url values but passing different slugs (different blog urls like https://www.example.com/blog-1).

Attempts:

  1. I used these functions mb_convert_encoding and mb_detect_encoding
  2. I made sure all urls I have passed are accessible through the browser.

Any thought, why I am getting special characters when I am calling file_get_contents function, and some time getting correct html format?

enter image description here

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2

Answers


  1. Chosen as BEST ANSWER
    0

    I have solved the issue by adding the following parameters to file_get_contents functions:

    private const EMBED_URL_APPEND = '?tab=3&object=%s&type=subgroup';
      
private const EMBED_URL_ENCODE= 'CM_949A11_1534_1603_DAG_DST_50_ÖVRIGT_1_1';
            
$urlEncoded= sprintf($url.self::EMBED_URL_APPEND, rawurlencode(self::EMBED_URL_ENCODE));
            
$html =  file_get_contents($urlEncoded);

  2. 0

    The output contains a mix of printable characters and escape sequences like "x08" or "x1E", which represent control characters or non-printable characters in ASCII or other character encoding schemes. The "x1F" at the beginning suggests that the data might be in a compressed or encoded format.

    Try to decode $html variable with base64 or another way.

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