how to get the cookies from a php curl into a variable

Question

$ch = curl_init('http://www.google.com/');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
// get headers too with this line
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
// get cookie
// multi-cookie variant contributed by @Combuster in comments
preg_match_all('/^Set-Cookie:\s*([^;]*)/mi', $result, $matches);
$cookies = array();
foreach($matches[1] as $item) {
    parse_str($item, $cookie);
    $cookies = array_merge($cookies, $cookie);
}
var_dump($cookies);

Although this question is quite old, and the accepted response is valid, I find it a bit unconfortable because the content of the HTTP response (HTML, XML, JSON, binary or whatever) becomes mixed with the headers.

I've found a different alternative. CURL provides an option (CURLOPT_HEADERFUNCTION) to set a callback that will be called for each response header line. The function will receive the curl object and a string with the header line.

You can use a code like this (adapted from TML response):

$cookies = Array();
$ch = curl_init('http://www.google.com/');
// Ask for the callback.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADERFUNCTION, "curlResponseHeaderCallback");
$result = curl_exec($ch);
var_dump($cookies);

function curlResponseHeaderCallback($ch, $headerLine) {
    global $cookies;
    if (preg_match('/^Set-Cookie:\s*([^;]*)/mi', $headerLine, $cookie) == 1)
        $cookies[] = $cookie;
    return strlen($headerLine); // Needed by curl
}

This solution has the drawback of using a global variable, but I guess this is not an issue for short scripts. And you can always use static methods and attributes if curl is being wrapped into a class.

This does it without regexps, but requires the PECL HTTP extension.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

$headers = http_parse_headers($result);
$cookobjs = Array();
foreach($headers AS $k => $v){
    if (strtolower($k)=="set-cookie"){
        foreach($v AS $k2 => $v2){
            $cookobjs[] = http_parse_cookie($v2);
        }
    }
}

$cookies = Array();
foreach($cookobjs AS $row){
    $cookies[] = $row->cookies;
}

$tmp = Array();
// sort k=>v format
foreach($cookies AS $v){
    foreach ($v  AS $k1 => $v1){
        $tmp[$k1]=$v1;
    }
}

$cookies = $tmp;
print_r($cookies);

If you use CURLOPT_COOKIE_FILE and CURLOPT_COOKIE_JAR curl will read/write the cookies from/to a file. You can, after curl is done with it, read and/or modify it however you want.