How to download webpage content using PHP CURL

PHP CURL-The powerful and useful library to fetch contents from websites remotely.Using Php CURL you can able to download the webpage source of any website and store it to a php variable.Curl requests to any webpage server and downloads the content.

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Processflow

1. Initialize Curl
2. Set Curl Options
3. Execute Curl
4. Close curl

Code

< ?
$ch = curl_init(); // Initialize Curl
$url="http://devlup.com"; //URL of the webpage you want to download
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); // Set CURL options
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1); //Return the handle if the curl session is set
$output = curl_exec($ch); // execute the curl
curl_close($ch); // close the curl
?>

In this way you can download the source page of the url to $output variable.There are many curl options (curl_setopt) that can be used according to your applications.See the list of curl options.

Many php programmers use file_get_contents() function to download content from websites but this has the limitation, you cannot download webpages that uses secure urls (https://).The other disadvantage of file_get_contents() is slower performance when compared to Curl.

Read our basic PHP tutorials to get started in PHP programming.If you need clarification regarding php CURL ,Post your comments below.