How do I get the HTML code of a web page in PHP?

Question

I want to retrieve the HTML code of a link (web page) in PHP. For example, if the link is

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask

then I want the HTML code of the page which is served. I want to retrieve this HTML code and store it in a PHP variable.

How can I do this?

Answer 1

If your PHP server allows url fopen wrappers then the simplest way is:

$html = file_get_contents('https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask'); 

If you need more control then you should look at the cURL functions:

$c = curl_init('https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask'); curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); //curl_setopt(... other options you want...)  $html = curl_exec($c);  if (curl_error($c))     die(curl_error($c));  // Get the status code $status = curl_getinfo($c, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);  curl_close($c);