Frequently, in my daytime job I have to fetch data from various url’s, either by sending get or post request, binding to different IP address etc. Long time I used my own socket based HTTP class, although I wasn’t quite happy with perfomances and various other things with it. I already used curl cli tool (mostly for debugging purposes), but didn’t really liked it’s php api, so I’ve decided to take some spare time and make some kind of oop wrapper for it, which should be easier to use for easy stuff like sending get/post request etc.

I use this class several months since then, and it evolved over time whenever I needed some new feature. Since various of my colleagues found it very usefull (some of them even sent me new methods for it), I’ve decided to put it out for public. Recently I submitted a code to phpclasses.org, and today got confirmation that class is officially approved.

Update 03/01/2007
New version 1.1 released with new features: fetch into file, upload, proxy etc.

Update 15/02/2008
New version 1.2 released with few bug fixes. New features are ability to send post string as string argument in send_post_data method, ability to accept gzipped content, close curl session etc.

Update 25/03/2013
Version 2.0 released. Pretty much the same features as old versions, but with updated code in order to match latest PHP changes. Code will be regularly updated on github.

You can download class and example files directly from gitgub https://github.com/dinke/curl_http_client

Here are few usage examples.

<?php
/**
 * @version 2.0
 * @package dinke.net
 * @copyright © 2013 Lampix.net
 * @author Dragan Dinic 
 */

require_once("curl_http_client.php");

$curl = new Curl_HTTP_Client();

//pretend to be Firefox 19.0 on Mac
$useragent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0";
$curl->set_user_agent($useragent);

//uncomment next two lines if you want to automatically manage cookies
//which will store them to file and send them on each http request
//$cookies_file = "/tmp/cookies.txt";
//$curl->store_cookies($cookies_file);

//Uncomment next line if you want to set credentials for basic http_auth
//$curl->set_credentials($username, $password);

//Uncomment next line if you want to set specific referrer
//$curl->set_referer('http://www.foo.com/referer_url/');

//if you want to send some post data
//form post data array like this one
$post_data = array('login' => 'pera', 'password' => 'joe', 'other_foo_field' => 'foo_value');
//or like a string: $post_data = 'login=pera&password=joe&other_foo_field=foo_value';

//and send request to http://www.foo.com/login.php. Result page is stored in $html_data string
$html_data = $curl->send_post_data("http://www.foo.com/login.php", $post_data);

//You can also fetch data from somewhere using get method!
//Fetch html from url
$html_data = $curl->fetch_url("http://www.foo.com/foobar.php?login=pera&password=joe&other_foo_field=foo_value");

//if you have more than one IP on your server,
//you can also bind to specific IP address like ...
//$bind_ip = "192.168.0.1";
//$curl->fetch_url("http://www.foo.com/login.php", $bind_ip);
//$html_data = $curl->send_post_data("http://www.foo.com/login.php", $post_data, $bind_ip);

//and there are many other things you can do like

//use proxy
//$curl->set_proxy('http://www.proxyurl.com');

//get http response code for last request
//$http_code = $curl->get_http_response_code();

//get last http request duration in sec
//$duration = $curl->get_request_duration();
?>