Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers, 2nd Edition

Appendix A. PHP/CURL Reference

PHP/CURL is an extremely powerful interface with a dizzying array of options. This appendix highlights only those options and features of PHP/CURL that are specifically interesting to webbot developers. The full specification of PHP/CURL is available at the PHP website.^[101]

Creating a Minimal PHP/CURL Session

In some regards, a PHP/CURL session is similar to a PHP file I/O session. Both create a session (or file handle) to reference an external file. And in both cases, when the file transfer is complete, the session is closed. However, PHP/CURL differs from standard file I/O because it requires a series of options that define the nature of the file transfer set before the exchange takes place. These options are set ...