For those of you looking for a win32 solution to get CURL to work, check
out  nice downloads set
up for you to enable the CURL functions along with a number of others.
(helped me out tremendously.)

CURL seems to only allow you to download a remote file to a local file,
then process it after the fact.  It does not seem to allow for working on
a file while it is being downloaded.

To return the output into a variable set CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER to 1, so
saith the php-dev list.

For all u people that can't get CURL to work on Windows load the Dynamic
Library by using:

dl("php_curl.dll");

if it says something like: can't use or load library files (or missing
dllz), it's missing some DLL's like
php4ts.dll,SSLEAY32.dll,php_curl.dll,MSVCRT.dll locate these DLL's in your
PHP binary and put them in your windows SYSTEM directory, i ectually found
this out by editing the php_curl.dll file and looked for the DLL files its
need (by searching for .dll) and just made sure that those files where
accessible for by this DLL. This technique actually works for each dll :-)
Look mommy i'm being a nerd :-)

Good luck,
Emile

I used to download www pages to my script and one of the pages was
different in MS explorer and different, when I downloaded it. Namely,
information, I was really interested in was missing. That was because the
server on the other bank of the river was looking at who is downloading
the page. Everything got fixed when I pretended I was MSIE. It is done
with curl. Here is a function, that you may use in similar situation

function download_pretending($url,$user_agent) {
   $ch = curl_init();
   curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
   curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $user_agent);
   curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
   curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
   $result = curl_exec ($ch); 
   curl_close ($ch);
   return $result;
}

There are undocumentated functions yet:

string curl_getinfo(int ch, int opt)
   Get information regarding a specific transfer

supported options:
CURLINFO_EFFECTIVE_URL
CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE
CURLINFO_HEADER_SIZE
CURLINFO_REQUEST_SIZE
CURLINFO_TOTAL_TIME
CURLINFO_NAMELOOKUP_TIME
CURLINFO_CONNECT_TIME
CURLINFO_PRETRANSFER_TIME
CURLINFO_SIZE_UPLOAD
CURLINFO_SIZE_DOWNLOAD
CURLINFO_SPEED_DOWNLOAD
CURLINFO_SPEED_UPLOAD

string curl_error(int ch)
   Return a string contain the last error for the current session
int curl_errno(int ch)
   Return an integer containing the last error number

the error codes are defined as constants in ../ext/curl/curl.c

If you want to write your entire HTTP request without use any other CURL
functions like CURLOPT_POST specify it within a curl_setopt
($ch,CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST , $req) line; 
Where $req looks like (let me imagine a POST request...):

POST /destination/script HTTP/1.1
Content-length: xxx
Content-type: text/xml
host: yourhost
accept: */*
accept-encoding: gzip, deflate
accept-language: en-us
connection: close; Keep-Alive
...
your POST data
...


CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST is not documented?!? but it's useful and amazing!

marcomcc (Roma)

The PHP 4.0.6 code contains some functions that are not documented on
this page:

curl_getinfo(int ch) - Returns an associative array with detailed
information about the last transfer, including the actual URL fetched, the
HTTP response code, and the time taken to perform each phase of the
transfer.

curl_error(int ch) - Returns a descriptive error string containing the
last error code for the session.

curl_errno(int ch) - Returns an integer containing the last error
number

Here is some output from curl_getinfo():

   Array

  (

    [url] =>
 >
    [http_code] => 200

    [header_size] => 261

    [request_size] => 155

    [filetime] => 0

    [total_time] => 0.7408

    [namelookup_time] => 0.031381

    [connect_time] => 0.154251

    [pretransfer_time] => 0.154589

    [size_upload] => 0

    [size_download] => 5612

    [speed_download] => 3133.7556977376

    [speed_upload] => 0

  )

In win32 (Windows 2000), I couldn't get apache to start with PHP/curl
support 'cause it said it couldn't find the php_curl.dll.  Well it was
there.
MSVCRT.dll was there as well, but after I ran the dll through
"Depends", there's a new DLL for the Microsoft .NET stuff. It's
called msvcr70.dll, and without it, php_curl.dll won't load.
I didn't want to load .NET framework on my machine (which
msdn.microsoft.com suggested)
I did a google search and found a downloadable copy of the file and threw
it in my %system%\system32 folder and all the lights and whistles came on.

in addition to the files named above, you should also add the file
libeay32.dll to your PHP directory. The file can be found in the dlls
directory

NOTE:
There is a bug in cURL version 7.9.4 that can cause problems form posts.

I just spent a couple hours pulling my hair out over this.

I just upgraded to 7.9.7 and everything seems to work fine.

Here's a link to info on the cURL site.

For an exaplanation of those Predefined Constants listed above see the
following URL: 

 

Using the customrequest for a complete post is wrong. Libcurl will add a
partial url, the http version and the standard headers after the post data
- while this works with a non-persistent connection and an apache web
server, it may fail under different conditions

For those of you having problems loading php_curl.dll using Apache+PHP on
Win32, try copying  ssleay32.dll and libeay32.dll from the php/dlls
directory to your php root directory.