Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers

Initiating PHP/CURL Sessions

Before you use cURL, you must initiate a session with the curl_init() function. Initialization creates a session variable, which identifies configurations and data belonging to a specific session. Notice how the session variable $s, created in Listing A-1, is used to configure, execute, and close the entire PHP/CURL session. Once you create a session, you may use it as many times as you need to.