Fetching Remote Web Pages With CURL and PHP

Written by Cory S.N. LaViska on April 8th, 2008

The simplest way to retrieve a remote webpage using PHP’s cURL library.

This is a very brief example of how to use PHP’s cURL Library to retrieve the source of a remote webpage:

<?php
$c = curl_init();
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_URL, "http://example.com/");
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$data = curl_exec($c);
curl_close($c);
?>

CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER is a predefined constant that tells cURL to return the output to a variable instead of displaying it in the browser. Visit the PHP Manual for a list of all CURL predefined constants and their uses.

The source of the remote file will be stored as a string in $data.

To use the cURL library, you must have the cURL PHP extension installed. See the PHP Manual for information about Installing CURL.

Comments

Personally I really enjoy using Snoopy, this way you don't need to have CURL installed on the server. Alot of service providers infact don't.

http://snoopy.sourceforge.net/

#1 Kim Steinhaug on Apr 9th, 2008

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