file_get_contents (and wget) very slow

Question

I'm using the google text to speech api, but for some reason it's being really slow when I connect to it via php or command line.

I'm doing this:

$this->mp3data = file_get_contents("http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q={$text}");  

Where $text is just a urlencoded string.

I've also tried doing it via wget on the command line:

wget http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=test

Either way takes about 20 seconds or more. Via php it does eventually get the contents and add them to a new file on my server as I want it to. Via wget it times the connection out.

However, if I just go to that url in the browser, it's pretty much instant.

Could anyone shed any light on why this might be occuring?

Thanks.

Answer 1

It's due to how Google parses robots. You need to spoof the User-Agent headers to pretend to be a computer.

Some info on how to go about this would be here:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=php%20curl%20spoof%20user%20agent

Answer 2

Managed to sort this out now, this is what I ended up doing and now it's only taking a few seconds:

$header=array("Content-Type: audio/mpeg"); 
        $ch = curl_init(); 
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $uri); 
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false); 
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $header); 
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 30); 
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); 
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13');
        $this->mp3data = curl_exec($ch); 
        curl_close($ch);