How can PHP be used to manipulate HTTP headers and mimic a browser during a request?

To manipulate HTTP headers and mimic a browser during a request using PHP, you can use the cURL library. cURL allows you to send HTTP requests with custom headers and user-agent strings to mimic different browsers. By setting the appropriate headers and user-agent string, you can make the request appear as if it is coming from a specific browser. 

$url = 'http://example.com';
$userAgent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.3';
$headers = [
    'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
    'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5',
    'Connection: keep-alive'
];

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $userAgent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

$response = curl_exec($ch);

if($response === false){
    echo 'Error: ' . curl_error($ch);
} else {
    echo $response;
}

curl_close($ch);

Keywords

PHP HTTP headers browser mimicry request manipulation cURL

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