Simple cURL example

Simple example on how to use the cURL module to download a website or any other file.

You can find more cURL options on the related PHP manual page.

function curl_download($Url){

    // is cURL installed yet?
    if (!function_exists('curl_init')){
        die('Sorry cURL is not installed!');
    }

    // OK cool - then let's create a new cURL resource handle
    $ch = curl_init();

    // Now set some options (most are optional)

    // Set URL to download
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $Url);

    // Set a referer
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://www.example.org/yay.htm");

    // User agent
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "MozillaXYZ/1.0");

    // Include header in result? (0 = yes, 1 = no)
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

    // Should cURL return or print out the data? (true = return, false = print)
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

    // Timeout in seconds
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);

    // Download the given URL, and return output
    $output = curl_exec($ch);

    // Close the cURL resource, and free system resources
    curl_close($ch);

    return $output;
}

print curl_download('http://www.example.org/');