PHP/CURL and Cookies
You can write webbots that support cookies without using PHP/CURL, but doing so adds to the complexity of your designs. Without PHP/CURL, you'll have to read each returned HTTP header, parse the cookies, and store them for later use. You will also have to decide which cookies to send to which domains, manage expiration dates, and return everything correctly in headers of page requests. PHP/CURL does all this for you, automatically. Even with PHP/CURL, however, cookies pose challenges to webbot designers.
Fortunately, PHP/CURL does support cookies, and we can effectively use it to capture the cookies from the previous example, as shown in Listing 22-2.
include("LIB_http.php"); $target="http://www.schrenk.com/nostarch/webbots/EXAMPLE_writing_cookies.php"; ...Get Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
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