You can also set the User Agent by specifying something for the [b]user_agent[/i] setting in php.ini (the ini_set() function will work). Or, you can also create a stream context (stream_context_create()) and specify the User Agent header in there. Both of these methods will enable standard file functions (fopen/fread, file_get_contents, etc) to send along the UA without using the cURL extension.