PHP file_get_contents() and setting request headers

Here is what worked for me (Dominic was just one line short).

$url = "";

$options = array(
  'http'=>array(
    'method'=>"GET",
    'header'=>"Accept-language: en\r\n" .
              "Cookie: foo=bar\r\n" .  // check function.stream-context-create on php.net
              "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.102011-10-16 20:23:10\r\n" // i.e. An iPad 
  )
);

$context = stream_context_create($options);
$file = file_get_contents($url, false, $context);

You can use this variable to retrieve response headers after file_get_contents() function.

Code:

  file_get_contents("http://example.com");
  var_dump($http_response_header);

Output:

array(9) {
  [0]=>
  string(15) "HTTP/1.1 200 OK"
  [1]=>
  string(35) "Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2008 17:30:38 GMT"
  [2]=>
  string(29) "Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)"
  [3]=>
  string(44) "Last-Modified: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 13:24:10 GMT"
  [4]=>
  string(27) "ETag: "280100-1b6-80bfd280""
  [5]=>
  string(20) "Accept-Ranges: bytes"
  [6]=>
  string(19) "Content-Length: 438"
  [7]=>
  string(17) "Connection: close"
  [8]=>
  string(38) "Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8"
}

Actually, upon further reading on the file_get_contents() function:

// Create a stream
$opts = [
    "http" => [
        "method" => "GET",
        "header" => "Accept-language: en\r\n" .
            "Cookie: foo=bar\r\n"
    ]
];

// DOCS: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.stream-context-create.php
$context = stream_context_create($opts);

// Open the file using the HTTP headers set above
// DOCS: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.file-get-contents.php
$file = file_get_contents('http://www.example.com/', false, $context);

You may be able to follow this pattern to achieve what you are seeking to, I haven't personally tested this though. (and if it doesn't work, feel free to check out my other answer)