PHP Curl - returned html all messed up

Question

I'm trying to fetch some contents about articles in a website via Curl, which I'm doing as follows :

    $url = 'http://lisboacity.olx.pt/oportunidade-pastor-alemao-7-meses-com-lop-iid-432402267';

    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 10);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322');
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
    $data = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    echo $data;

However, as you can see, the result is similar to this :

‹ÜW_oÛ6N€~F{hD’å?±“ØÜÄm‚&qZ;-Ö¢0h‰–™R¢JR¶ÓapcèÃ°}*ö²§)%Vœ&YÚ·†eêî~¿;òx<6×ö{{ƒ_N»èp|„NÏžî!ËvÝ×•=×Ýìg‚ªSòÐ@àXREyŒ™ëvO,dM”Jv\w6›9³ŠÃEè^º±ªË8—Ä TµW›ú•~À#" #mj“)¶¬=++{p‘ùÙ¨e)2Wmù,$QÃ~Ïn4jÛ¶g!÷.¨#‡)‹p‰26«>Í–M·.ƒTŽ8ö©ºp8›;‰r-¤°ÕJÂÆ£¢Š‘v/áB¥1 p@ÖN±T\ #Ñ'Žê("’H ŽÐQïÔ…#ƒ:10•(à £¨Ï%¼D]øá??ñ¦›d‘Å8"-+ Ò4Ñ3_ç:åÓÏÁ†ð’\[‘8]ÿÑëÎà zÕ;AOûý½ƒÞÓþA÷ðxíÑê£Uã»ôvS_pB“M ’aÙq€AŠX"øNa¦bx’;hŸÊäoCÃ0þjB3C@ Rå"™0Ãz€cž&ü{æäjúô '&äö'¤åUªõZ½î5êÀd2Ñø=„µ,Ç<†bÛìž3èGöØj±Ð{9Ø; Ã½ÞÉ«,Æ]©.‘îO!Åb~–Á2 !°'uåÊj_Êÿ„œ=†žç;Æ$"Ó-3–

I've also tried to load the url contents with PHP's DomDocument class with the same result.

What could be causing this? Thanks in advance!

Looks like it could be an encoding issue, but I'm not sure. It appears that the page is in unicode, so you probably will need to output it as such for it to appear the same. — John V.
– John V., Commented Sep 19, 2012 at 3:25
Scratch the unicode comment. Just make sure you output in the same encoding that it is on the site. — John V.
– John V., Commented Sep 19, 2012 at 3:31

Community · Accepted Answer · 2023-11-17 20:38:18Z

8

The output is gzip encoded. Try this option to decompress the content:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, '');

CURLOPT_ENCODING: The contents of the "Accept-Encoding: " header. This enables decoding of the response. Supported encodings are "identity", "deflate", and "gzip". If an empty string, "", is set, a header containing all supported encoding types is sent.

from https://www.php.net/curl_setopt

edited Nov 17, 2023 at 20:38

CommunityBot

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answered Sep 19, 2012 at 3:30

jspcal

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2 Comments

J. Bruni Over a year ago

Exactly. The page contents are compressed.

yoda Over a year ago

Thanks a lot, I was finding very odd to be able to open some links and not others. That did the trick. Cheers!

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