Faking your User Agent with cURL

chris — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 15:34:18 +0000

It’s very often needed to fake your User Agent, not to do any untoward, but to test various aspects of your website. Perhaps you want your website to display differently when using Internet Explorer 7 than when using Firefox 3.5. For whatever reason you have, here is a simple solution I use for my web crawlers.

$userAgent = "Firefox (WindowsXP) - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $userAgent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, false);
$html= curl_exec($ch);

With a bit of coding you can fill up an array with all the user agent strings you can find on the Internet, and randomly use them as the user agent when using cURL.

PHP Software Developing » fake user agent

Faking your User Agent with cURL