cURL blank return

Question

I have checked all the postings of everything I could and found no solutions to my issue. And unfortunately I am quite new to php so my knowledge is pretty slim. Therefore I pose my question:

Given the following code, why is the page blank when it should be echo'ing either the curl_error or $content?

<?php

$url = "http://thenewboston.org/";

function curl_get_contents($url)
{
  $ch = curl_init($url);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
  $data = curl_exec($ch);
  echo curl_error($ch);
  curl_close($ch);
  return $data;
}
    $content = curl_get_contents( $url );
    echo $content;
?>

This not the specific URL I need to connect to howver at the moment I am not able to pull data from any URL I try.

Thanks.

Are you running it on an external server? I am only running it on Xampp thought I wouldn't think that would matter — user3736031
– user3736031, Commented Jun 13, 2014 at 0:49
Please make youre you have php_curl installed. Prepend something like echo 'curl Extension is: '.( function_exists('curl_version') ? 'present' : 'not installed or disabled'); to your script — ffflabs
– ffflabs, Commented Jun 13, 2014 at 0:51
ran on ubuntu vm. try adding error_reporting(E_ALL); in the beginning — Fabricator
– Fabricator, Commented Jun 13, 2014 at 0:51
I do have curl installed and enabled, version 7.36.0 for reference. Tried the error_reporting(E_ALL); with no result :P — user3736031
– user3736031, Commented Jun 13, 2014 at 0:54
Any reason you're not using file_get_contents()? Does your server have fopen_url disabled? — Barmar
– Barmar, Commented Jun 13, 2014 at 1:05

Giacomo1968 · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-13 01:26:42Z

4

http://thenewboston.org/ redirects to https://buckysroom.org/, and that site requires SSL version 3. Add:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSLVERSION, 3);

edited Jun 13, 2014 at 1:26

Giacomo1968

25.3k11 gold badges78 silver badges106 bronze badges

answered Jun 13, 2014 at 1:13

Barmar

789k57 gold badges555 silver badges669 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

Comments

Giacomo1968 · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-13 01:26:54Z

@Barmar’s answer is correct about the SSL. But here is my refactoring of your code with a few more curl options set that I use as a default in cases like this. Note the user agent is most often the biggest reason why curl attempts fail so I have CURLOPT_USERAGENT set to a standard Firefox string, but feel free to change that to be anything else you feel might be a good user agent setting:

$url = "http://thenewboston.org/";

function curl_get_contents($url) {
  $curl_timeout = 5;
  $curl = curl_init();
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSLVERSION, 3);
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $curl_timeout);
  curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13');
  $data = curl_exec($curl);
  curl_close($curl);
  return $data;
}

$content = curl_get_contents( $url );

echo $content;

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

cURL blank return

2 Answers 2

Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

2 Answers 2

Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related