What are some alternative approaches to logging into external websites in PHP without using cURL?

When logging into external websites in PHP without using cURL, an alternative approach is to use the `file_get_contents` function along with `stream_context_create` to make HTTP requests. This allows you to send POST data and headers to the external website for authentication. 

// Set the POST data
$postData = http_build_query([
    'username' => 'example_username',
    'password' => 'example_password'
]);

// Set the HTTP headers
$options = [
    'http' => [
        'method' => 'POST',
        'header' => 'Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
        'content' => $postData
    ]
];

// Create the stream context
$context = stream_context_create($options);

// Make the HTTP request
$response = file_get_contents('https://example.com/login', false, $context);

// Output the response
echo $response;

Keywords

web scraping HTTP requests authentication session management DOM parsing

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