Tech aspirant – The ultimate technology Blog

This is a nice and simple substitute to get_file_contents() using curl, it returns FALSE if $contents is empty.

<?php
function curl_get_file_contents($URL)
{
$c = curl_init();
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_URL, $URL);
$contents = curl_exec($c);
curl_close($c);

if ($contents) return $contents;
else return FALSE;
}
?>

Then another question

How to enable cURL in your server ?

To enable curl library we need to modify the php.ini file.

1) Locate the following files:
apache\bin\php.ini
php\php.ini
php\php4\php.ini or php\php5\php.ini

2) Uncomment the following line on your php.ini file by removing the semicolon.

;extension=php_curl.dll

3) Restart your apache server.

4) Check your phpinfo if curl was properly enabled.

Otherwise you can dynamically enable the library by calling dl(); function. But it is deprecated by new version of PHP

The default windows distribution of PHP comes with GD. So enabling the GD extension should be as simple as opening your php.ini file and uncommenting the necessary line. So this line:

Code:
;extension=php_gd2.dll
Should look like this (Remove the preceeding semi-colon):

Code:
extension=php_gd2.dll
Generally, your php.ini file will be in the folder in which you installed PHP.