Anything wrong with my cURL code (http status of 0)?

Question

Consistently getting a status of 0 even though if I copy and paste the url sent into my browser, I get a json object right back

<?php


$mainUrl = "https://api.xxxx.com/?";
$co = "xxxxx";
$pa = "xxxx";
$par = "xxxx";
$part= "xxxx";
$partn = "xxxx";
$us= "xxx";
$fields_string;
$fields = array(
            'co'=>urlencode($co),
            'pa'=>urlencode($pa),
            'par'=>urlencode($par),
            'part'=>urlencode($part),
            'partn'=>urlencode($partn),
            'us'=>urlencode($us)
            );

foreach($fields as $key=>$value) { $fields_string .= $key . '=' . $value . '&' ;}

$fields_string = rtrim($fields_string, "&");
$fields_string = "?" . $fields_string;

$url = "https://api.xxxxx.com/" . $fields_string;

$request =  $url; 

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,'3');
$content = trim(curl_exec($ch));
$http_status = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);

curl_close($ch);
print $url;
print $http_status;
print $content; 



?>

Answer 1

Realized that I was having SSL issues. Simply set CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER and CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST to false. Works.

Answer 2

FYI, you can also get a status code of 0 if the curl connection times out before the remote server returns data. In that case you need to set curl time out options to avoid that situation. Just posting this for anyone else having status 0 problems.