URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration

When opening external URL's through PHP, you might stumble upon the dreaded "URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration"-error message.

It just means that remote access was disabled in the server configuration, so you can't load external files (say: images, text files, xml files, ...). If the server allows you to override the server configuration in PHP scripts, you can do the following on top of the page you're experiencing this problem.

<?php
ini_set('allow_url_fopen', 'on');
// .....
?>

If that's not allowed, you can change this setting in the php.ini file, maintained by your server administrator.

/*;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; Fopen wrappers ;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
 
; Whether to allow the treatment of URLs (like http:// or ftp://) as files. */
allow_url_fopen = On

In most cases however, this won't be allowed. You could try functions such as file_get_contents(), and parse the result afterwards - to have a similar working method such as fopen().