php - How to get page content using cURL?

Question

I would like to scrape the content of this Google search result page using curl. I've been trying setting different user agents, and setting other options but I just can't seem to get the content of that page, as I often get redirected or I get a "page moved" error.

I believe it has something to do with the fact that the query string gets encoded somewhere but I'm really not sure how to get around that.

    //$url is the same as the link above
    $ch = curl_init();
    $user_agent='Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0'
    curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $user_agent);
    curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
    curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
    curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt ($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,120);
    curl_setopt ($ch,CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,120);
    curl_setopt ($ch,CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS,10);
    curl_setopt ($ch,CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE,"cookie.txt");
    curl_setopt ($ch,CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR,"cookie.txt");
    echo curl_exec ($ch);

What do I need to do to get my php code to show the exact content of the page as I would see it on my browser? What am I missing? Can anyone point me to the right direction?

I've seen similar questions on SO, but none with an answer that could help me.

EDIT:

I tried to just open the link using the Selenium WebDriver, that gives the same results as cURL. I am still thinking that this has to do with the fact that there are special characters in the query string which are getting messed up somewhere in the process.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14953867/how-to-get-page-content-using-curl

Answer 1

this is how:

   /**
     * Get a web file (HTML, XHTML, XML, image, etc.) from a URL.  Return an
     * array containing the HTTP server response header fields and content.
     */
    function get_web_page( $url )
    {
        $user_agent='Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0';

        $options = array(

            CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST  =>"GET",        //set request type post or get
            CURLOPT_POST           =>false,        //set to GET
            CURLOPT_USERAGENT      => $user_agent, //set user agent
            CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE     =>"cookie.txt", //set cookie file
            CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR      =>"cookie.txt", //set cookie jar
            CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,     // return web page
            CURLOPT_HEADER         => false,    // don't return headers
            CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,     // follow redirects
            CURLOPT_ENCODING       => "",       // handle all encodings
            CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER    => true,     // set referer on redirect
            CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 120,      // timeout on connect
            CURLOPT_TIMEOUT        => 120,      // timeout on response
            CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS      => 10,       // stop after 10 redirects
        );

        $ch      = curl_init( $url );
        curl_setopt_array( $ch, $options );
        $content = curl_exec( $ch );
        $err     = curl_errno( $ch );
        $errmsg  = curl_error( $ch );
        $header  = curl_getinfo( $ch );
        curl_close( $ch );

        $header['errno']   = $err;
        $header['errmsg']  = $errmsg;
        $header['content'] = $content;
        return $header;
    }

Example

//Read a web page and check for errors:

$result = get_web_page( $url );

if ( $result['errno'] != 0 )
    ... error: bad url, timeout, redirect loop ...

if ( $result['http_code'] != 200 )
    ... error: no page, no permissions, no service ...

$page = $result['content'];