Can websites block PHP scripts from accessing their content, and what are some strategies to overcome such restrictions when retrieving data using PHP?

Websites can block PHP scripts from accessing their content by checking the user-agent of the incoming requests or implementing CAPTCHA challenges. To overcome such restrictions, you can try setting a custom user-agent for your PHP script or using tools like cURL to mimic a browser request. 

// Set a custom user-agent for the PHP script
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://example.com');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.3');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

echo $response;

Keywords

web scraping PHP content blocking data retrieval bypassing restrictions

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