Curl

PHP supports libcurl, a library created by Daniel Stenberg, that allows you to connect and communicate to many different types of servers with many different types of protocols. libcurl currently supports the http, https, ftp, gopher, telnet, dict, file, and ldap protocols. libcurl also supports HTTPS certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading (this can also be done with PHP's ftp extension), HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, and user+password authentication.

These functions have been added in PHP 4.0.2.

cURL is a library which allows you to connect and communicate to many different types of servers with many different types of protocols. Using cURL you can:

• Implement payment gateways payment notification scripts.
• Download and upload files from remote servers.
• Login to other websites and access members only sections.

A typical PHP cURL usage follows the following sequence of steps.

curl_init Initializes the session and returns a cURL handle which can be passed to other cURL functions.

curl_opt This is the main work horse of cURL library. This function is called multiple times and specifies what we want the cURL library to do.

curl_exec Executes a cURL session.

curl_close Closes the current cURL session.

Below are some examples which should make the working of cURL more clearer.

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cURL is a library which allows you to connect and communicate to many different types of servers with many different types of protocols. Using cURL you can:

Implement payment gateways payment notification scripts.
Download and upload files from remote servers.
Login to other websites and access members only sections.