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# Chapter 20. Using remote files

As long as support for the "URL fopen wrapper" is enabled when you configure PHP (which it is unless you explicitly pass the `--disable-url-fopen-wrapper` flag to configure (for versions up to 4.0.3) or set `allow_url_fopen` to off in php.ini (for newer versions)), you can use HTTP and FTP URLs with most functions that take a filename as a parameter, including the require() and include() statements.

> Note: You can't use remote files in include() and require() statements on Windows.

For example, you can use this to open a file on a remote web server, parse the output for the data you want, and then use that data in a database query, or simply to output it in a style matching the rest of your website.

Example 20-1. Getting the title of a remote page

    <?php
    $file = fopen ("http://www.php.net/", "r");
    if (!$file) {
        echo "<p>Unable to open remote file.\n";
        exit;
    }
    while (!feof ($file)) {
        $line = fgets ($file, 1024);
        /* This only works if the title and its tags are on one line */
        if (eregi ("<title>(.*)</title>", $line, $out)) {
            $title = $out[1];
            break;
        }
    }
    fclose($file);
    ?>

You can also write to files on an FTP as long you connect as a user with the correct access rights, and the file doesn't exist already. To connect as a user other than 'anonymous', you need to specify the username (and possibly password) within the URL, such as 'ftp://user:password@ftp.example.com/path/to/file'. (You can use the same sort of syntax to access files via HTTP when they require Basic authentication.)

Example 20-2. Storing data on a remote server

    <?php
    $file = fopen ("ftp://ftp.php.net/incoming/outputfile", "w");
    if (!$file) {
        echo "<p>Unable to open remote file for writing.\n";
        exit;
    }
    /* Write the data here. */
    fputs ($file, "$HTTP_USER_AGENT\n");
    fclose ($file);
    ?>

> Note: You might get the idea from the example above to use this technique to write to a remote log, but as mentioned above, you can only write to a new file using the URL fopen() wrappers. To do distributed logging like that, you should take a look at syslog().

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