How can I send cookies using PHP curl in addition to CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE?

Question

I am scraping some content from a website after a form submission. The problem is that the script is failing every now and then, say 2 times out of 5 the script fails. I am using php curl, COOKIEFILE and COOKIEJAR to handle the cookie. However when I observed the sent headers of my browser (when visiting the target website from my browser and using live http headers) and the headers sent by php and saw there are many differences.

My browser sent a lot more cookie variables than php curl. I think this difference might be because javascript is resposible for setting most of the cookies, however I'm not sure about this.

I am using the below code to do the scraping and I am showing the sent headers of my browser and of php curl:

$ckfile = tempnam ("/tmp", 'cookiename');

$url = 'https://www.domain.com/firststep';
$poststring = 'variable1=4&variable2=5';
$ch = curl_init ($url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $ckfile);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $ckfile);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 30);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $poststring);
$output = curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close($ch);



$url = 'https://www.domain.com/nextstep';
$poststring = 'variableB1=4&variableB2=5';
$ch = curl_init ($url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $ckfile);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $ckfile);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 30);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $poststring);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT, true);
$output = curl_exec ($ch);
$headers = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT);
curl_close($ch);

print_r($headers);

// Gives:
POST /d-cobs-web/doffers.html;jsessionid=7BC2A5277A4EB07D9A7237A707BE1366 HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Mozilla
Host: domain.subdomain.nl
Accept: */*
Cookie: JSESSIONID=7BC2A5277A4EB07D9A7237A707BE1366; www-20480=MIFBNLFDFAAA
Content-Length: 187
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

// Where live http headers gives:
POST /d-cobs-web/doffers.html;jsessionid=7BC2A5277A4EB07D9A7237A707BE1366 HTTP/1.1
Host: domain.subdomain.nl
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: nl,en-us;q=0.7,en;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
Referer: https://domain.subdomain.nl/dd/doffers.html?returnUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fttcc.subdomain.nl%2Fdd%2Fpreferences.html%3FValueChanged%3Dfalse&BEGBA=&departureDate=13-06-2013&extChangeTime=&pax2=0&bp=&pax1=1&pax4=0&bk=&pax3=0&shopId=&xtpage=&partner=NSINT&bc=&xt_pc=&ov=&departureTime=&comfortClass=2&destination=DEBHF&thalysTicketless=&beneUser=&debugDOffer=&logonId=&valueChanged=&iDomesticOrigin=&rp=&returnTime=&locale=nl_NL&vu=&thePassWeekend=false&returnDate=&xtsite=&pax=A&lc2=&lc1=&lc4=&lc3=&lc6=&lc5=&BECRA=&passType2=&custId=&lc9=&iDomesticDestination=&passType1=A&lc7=&lc8=&origin=NLASC&toporef=&pid=&passType4=&returnTimeType=1&passType3=&departureTimeType=1&socusId=&idr3=&xtn2=&loyaltyCard=&idr2=&idr1=&thePassBusiness=false&cid=14812
Content-Length: 219
Cookie: subdomainPARTNER=NSINT; JSESSIONID=CB3FEB3AC72AD61A80BFED91D3FD96CA; www-20480=MHFBNLFDFAAA; campaignPos=5; www-47873=MGFBNLFDFAAA; __utma=1.993399624.1370027094.1370040145.1370082133.5; __utmc=1; __utmz=1.1370027094.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none); BCSessionID=5dc05787-c2c8-43e1-9abe-93989970b087; BCPermissionLevel=PERSONAL; __utmb=1.1.10.1370082133
Connection: keep-alive
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache
AJAXREQUEST=_viewRoot&doffersForm=doffersForm&doffersForm%3AvalueChanged=&doffersForm%3ArequestValid=true&javax.faces.ViewState=j_id3&doffersForm%3Aj_id937=doffersForm%3Aj_id937&valueChanged=false&AJAX%3AEVENTS_COUNT=1&

I would like to use:

$headers   = array();
$headers[] = 'Cookie: ' . $cookie;

and:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);

where:

$cookie = 'subdomainPARTNER=NSINT; JSESSIONID=CB3FEB3AC72AD61A80BFED91D3FD96CA; www-20480=MHFBNLFDFAAA; campaignPos=5; www-47873=MGFBNLFDFAAA; __utma=1.993399624.1370027094.1370040145.1370082133.5; __utmc=1; __utmz=1.1370027094.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none); BCSessionID=5dc05787-c2c8-43e1-9abe-93989970b087; BCPermissionLevel=PERSONAL; __utmb=1.1.10.1370082133';

Some of the parameters in the cookie above I might be able to scrape from the content of the website, but not all. Some of them I might be able to read from the $ckfile, but I don't know how to do that. Especially the utma utmc, utmz, utmcsr, utmccn, utmcmd I am not able to get from anywhere, I think these are generated by the javascript.

Question 1: Am I doing something wrong with the cookie handling in the current code as very few cookie variables are sent by php curl and a lot more by the browser? Further: can other differences between sent headers by browser and php curl be a problem to return the right content?

Question 2: Are the missing cookie variables due to the javascript setting those cookies?

Question 3: What is the best way to handle the cookies to make sure that all required cookies are being sent to the remote server?

Your help is very welcome!

Answer 1

If the cookie is generated from script, then you can send the cookie manually along with the cookie from the file(using cookie-file option). For example:

# sending manually set cookie
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array("Cookie: test=cookie"));

# sending cookies from file
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $ckfile);

In this case curl will send your defined cookie along with the cookies from the file.

If the cookie is generated through javascrript, then you have to trace it out how its generated and then you can send it using the above method(through http-header).

The utma utmc, utmz are seen when cookies are sent from Mozilla. You shouldn't bet worry about these things anymore.

Finally, the way you are doing is alright. Just make sure you are using absolute path for the file names(i.e. /var/dir/cookie.txt) instead of relative one.

Always enable the verbose mode when working with curl. It will help you a lot on tracing the requests. Also it will save lot of your times.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, true);