Exploring the 500 Error Encountered with file_get_contents()

When accessing web pages via the file_get_contents() function, it's sometimes encountered that a 500 internal server error occurs, while the page renders correctly in a browser. This issue prevents developers from retrieving the desired content.

In your specific case, the following code snippet is causing the error:

$html = file_get_contents("https://www.[URL].com"); 
echo $html;

To resolve this issue, you can try the following workaround:

$opts = array('http' =>
    array('header' => "User-Agent:MyAgent/1.0\r\n"));
$context = stream_context_create($opts);
$header = file_get_contents('https://www.example.com', false, $context);

This code adds a User-Agent header to your request, which can help in certain cases. If this solution doesn't alleviate the problem, it's possible that accessing the target website over HTTPS is restricted for your setup.