Specifications

The curl_setopt() function takes three parameters. The first is the session handle, the second

is the name of the parameter to set, and the third is the value to which you would like the para-

meter set.

In this case we are setting two options. The first is the URL that we want to connect to. This is

the CURLOPT_URL parameter. The second one is the file where we want the data from the con-

nection to go. If you don’t specify a file, the data from the connection will go to standard

output—usually the browser. In this case we have specified the file handle of the output file we

just opened.

When the options are set, we tell cURL to actually make the connection:

curl_exec ($ch);

Here, this will open a connection to the URL we have specified, download the page, and store

it in the file pointed to by

$fp.

After the connection has been made, we need to close the cURL session, and close the file we

wrote to:

curl_close ($ch);

fclose($fp);

That’s it for this simple example.

You might find it worthwhile to look at the Snoopy class, available from

http://snoopy.sourceforge.net/

This class provides Web client functionality through cURL.