cURL is a command line tool for transferring files with URL syntax, supporting FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, GOPHER, TELNET, DICT, FILE and LDAP. cURL supports HTTPS certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, kerberos...), file transfer resume, proxy tunneling and other useful tricks.

Example:

Fetching a web page

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://example.com/");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
?>


Alternative for file_get_contents()
Instead of:

$file_contents = file_get_contents('http://example.com/');

// display file
echo $file_contents;
?>

Use this:

$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5; // set to zero for no timeout
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://example.com');
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$file_contents = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

// display file
echo $file_contents;
?>

Alternative for file()
Instead of:

$lines = file('http://example.com/');

// display file line by line
foreach($lines as $line_num => $line) {
echo "Line # {$line_num} : ".htmlspecialchars($line)."
n";
}
?>

Use this:

$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5; // set to zero for no timeout
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://example.com');
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$file_contents = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$lines = array();
$lines = explode("n", $file_contents);

// display file line by line
foreach($lines as $line_num => $line) {
echo "Line # {$line_num} : ".htmlspecialchars($line)."
n";
}
?>