Current implementation of fopen() and any other built in functions that allow opening of Urls, always sends a User-Agent: PHP/PHP_VERSION header when sending the request, which cannot be disabled by the user. Afaik this header is entirely optional and in some cases even causes problems if the site decides to do User-Agent based blocking. The biggest example of this I could find was Google, that blocks client sending the User-Agent: PHP/PHP_VERSION header from accessing any of the search result pages and will send a 403 error message. I imagine there are probably plenty of other web sites that are doing the same or will do so in the future.
Perhaps, it would make sense to add an option inside php.ini allowing the user to disable the sending of this header. Otherwise to reliably open remote URLs, users need to use CURL or manually negotiate connections via fsockopen() or the sockets extension. This is especially annoying, since no where in the PHP documentation is it mentioned that this header is sent when PHP initiates a connection to HTTP or HTTPS. Ilia -- PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
