PHP Get Contents of a URL or Page

If you only need GET and allow_url_fopen is enabled on your server, you can simply use

$data = file_get_contents('http://api.somesite.com');

This is how you would use cURL to get contents from a remote url. You would define the function and make calls like url_get_contents("http://example.com/");

function url_get_contents($url, $useragent='cURL', $headers=false, $follow_redirects=true, $debug=false) {    // initialise the CURL library    $ch = curl_init();    // specify the URL to be retrieved    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);    // we want to get the contents of the URL and store it in a variable    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);    // specify the useragent: this is a required courtesy to site owners    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $useragent);    // ignore SSL errors    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);    // return headers as requested    if ($headers==true){        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER,1);    }    // only return headers    if ($headers=='headers only') {        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY ,1);    }    // follow redirects - note this is disabled by default in most PHP installs from 4.4.4 up    if ($follow_redirects==true) {        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);     }    // if debugging, return an array with CURL's debug info and the URL contents    if ($debug==true) {        $result['contents']=curl_exec($ch);        $result['info']=curl_getinfo($ch);    }    // otherwise just return the contents as a variable    else $result=curl_exec($ch);    // free resources    curl_close($ch);    // send back the data    return $result;}

$ch = curl_init();curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.url.com/cakephp/controller/action/param:1" ); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 ); $dataFromExternalServer=curl_exec($ch); 

See also: http://php.net/manual/en/function.curl-exec.php