Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Perform HTTP-GET via Curl Commands inside PHP

PHP supports libcurl that allows you to connect and communicate to many different types of servers with many different types of protocols.

libcurl currently supports the http, https, ftp, gopher, telnet, dict, file, and ldap protocols. libcurl also supports HTTPS certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, and user+password authentication.

Now the fun begins.

$url = 'API server host';
$curl;
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION, CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
$result = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
header('Content-Type: application/xml; charset=ISO-8859-1');
print $result;


By default, curl makes use of HTTP-GET unless explicitly specified to be false and as HTTP-POST method.