The PHP Client URL (cURL) library
Fulvio Corno
e-lite Research Group Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica Politecnico di Torino Torino - Italy http://elite.polito.it
v. 1.0, 2009-03-23
The cURL library
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Outline
The cURL library
The PHP Client URL (cURL) library 2 / 13
The cURL library
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The problem
From a PHP page, being able to retrieve information served by another web server The information must be processed by the PHP page, not simply shown on the resulting page We need an synchronous remote call mechanism
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The cURL library
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Ingredients
1 2
The URL address of a remote web page The parameters that we should pass to such remote page
How many parameters? Names? Data types? Values? In what form? GET? POST? Encoding?
The format of the results returned by the remote page
Format: text? xml? DTD or schema? Error codes: in http response header or encoded as part of the result?
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The cURL library
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The cURL library
cURL is one of the most powerful PHP extensions. It stands for Client URL, and allows you to communicate with other servers using a wide range of protocols. libcurl (the library behind the PHP cURL extension) currently supports a wide range of protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, TELNET, FILE, LDAP, DICT, GOPHER and HTTPS, as well as HTTPS certicates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, and user:password authentication.
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The cURL library
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Main functions
curl_init Initialize a cURL session returns a handle object ($ch) curl_setopt Set an option for a cURL transfer common options: URL, POST data, result disposition curl_exec Perform a cURL session actual data transfer and http request curl_close Close a cURL session end of transaction
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The cURL library
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Basic example
$ch = curl_init( ) ; curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://abc.com/page.php") ; // do a POST curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true) ; curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "id=333")
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true ) ; // return the result of curl_exec, instead // of outputting it directly $result = curl_exec($ch) ; curl_close($ch) ;
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The cURL library
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Sending the request
set the URL with CURLOPT_URL parameters in GET
encoded in the URL
"...page.php?id=333&user=pippo" parameters in POST
specify POST instead of GET with option CURLOPT_POST set to
true
specify all parameters in CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS
encoded as a string as an associative array in PHP
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The cURL library
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Getting the result
call curl_exec($ch) usually, the result is directly interpolated in the page (implicit echo) to avoid interpolation, set CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER to true
result is returned as a string by the curl_exec call
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The cURL library
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Other functions
curl_copy_handle Copy a cURL handle along with all of its preferences curl_errno Return the last error number curl_error Return a string containing the last error for the current session curl_getinfo Get information regarding a specic transfer curl_setopt_array Set multiple options for a cURL transfer curl_version Gets cURL version information
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The cURL library
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Other options
CURLOPT_HEADER TRUE to include the header in the output CURLOPT_PORT An alternative port number to connect to. CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER An array of HTTP header elds to set. CURLOPT_FILE The le that the transfer should be written to. The default is STDOUT (the browser window).
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The cURL library
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Further information
http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.curl.php
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The cURL library
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License
This document is lincensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
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