How to get cookies from curl into a variable in PHP ?

0 0 1 minute read

The cURL standing for Client URL refers to a library for transferring data using various protocols supporting cookies, HTTP, FTP, IMAP, POP3, HTTPS (with SSL Certification), etc. This example will illustrate how to get cookies from a PHP cURL into a variable. The functions provide an option to set a callback that will be called for each response header line. The function will receive the curl object and a string with the header line. Along with their purpose, required for this example are described below:

curl_init(): Used to initialize a curl object.
curl_setopt(object, parameter, value): Used to set the value of parameter for a certain curl object.
curl_exec(object): Used to execute the current curl session. Called after setting the values for desired curl parameters.
preg_match_all(regExp, inputVariable, OutputVariable): Used to perform a global regular expression check.

Example 1: This example illustrates how to fetch cookies from www.amazon.com

<?php 
   
// URL to fetch cookies 
$url = "https://www.amazon.com/"; 
   
// Initialize cURL object 
$curlObj = curl_init(); 
   
/* setting values to required cURL parameters. 
CURLOPT_URL is used to set the URL to fetch  
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER is enabled curl 
response to be saved in a variable  
CURLOPT_HEADER enables curl to include 
protocol header CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER 
enables to fetch SSL encrypted HTTPS request.*/
curl_setopt($curlObj,  CURLOPT_URL,  $url); 
curl_setopt($curlObj,  CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,  1); 
curl_setopt($curlObj,  CURLOPT_HEADER,  1); 
curl_setopt($curlObj,  CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER,  false); 
$result = curl_exec($curlObj); 
   
// Matching the response to extract cookie value 
preg_match_all('/^Set-Cookie:\s*([^;]*)/mi', 
          $result,  $match_found); 
   
$cookies = array(); 
foreach($match_found[1] as $item) { 
    parse_str($item,  $cookie); 
    $cookies = array_merge($cookies,  $cookie); 
} 
   
// Printing cookie data 
print_r( $cookies); 
   
// Closing curl object instance 
curl_close($curlObj); 
?> 

Note: Each website has its own format of storing cookies according to its requirements. Therefore, any specific format is not available for cookies.
Output:

Example 2: This example illustrates how to fetch cookies from www.google.com

<?php 
  
$url = "https://www.google.com/"; 
$curlObj = curl_init(); 
  
curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_URL, $url); 
curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); 
curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1); 
curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false); 
$result = curl_exec($curlObj); 
      
preg_match_all('/^Set-Cookie:\s*([^;]*)/mi', 
                $result, $match_found); 
$cookies = array(); 
  
foreach($match_found[1] as $item) { 
    parse_str($item, $cookie); 
    $cookies = array_merge($cookies, $cookie); 
} 
      
print_r( $cookies); 
curl_close($curlObj); 
?> 