parsing URL contents into a variable using PHP

[dbrb2]

Hi - I have a php script on server A into which I can pass paramters via the URL. This script produces HTML which is then displayed in the users browser.

Server B has a page that want to make use of some of the info within this HTML.

My first solution was to use javascript and ajax. I issued an ajax request to the script on server A, including the parameters I wanted. The call responded with the HTML placed into a javascript variable on server B, which I could then parse to extract the info I wanted. This worked absolytely fine, however, this required running server side javascript.

I was wondering if there was any way to do this exclusively in PHP. I played around with output buffering, but couldn't find a solution that let me pass in the URL and to capture the output to a variable.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Ben

 

[jet042]

Check out the cURL PHP package.

http://us.php.net/manual/en/book.curl.php

 

[jpadie]

sure. why can't the clientside ajax also send a request to a php script on server B? (you'd need to call a script from server b in the (x)html, of course); to get around cross-server limitations.
or why can't server a automatically call a web service on server b, scripted in php? this would be as simple as an fopen() call.