How to use curl GET instead of POST

Question

I'm tyring to use curl to print a return from a url. The code I have so far looks like this:

<?php
    $street = $_GET['street'];
    $city = $_GET['city'];
    $state = $_GET['state'];
    $zip = $_GET['zip'];

    $url = 'http://eligibility.cert.sc.egov.usda.gov/eligibility/eligibilityservice';
    $query = 'eligibilityType=Property&requestString=<?xml version="1.0"?><Eligibility xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="/var/lib/tomcat5/webapps/eligibility/Eligibilitywsdl.xsd"><PropertyRequest StreetAddress1="'.$street.'" StreetAddress2="" StreetAddress3="" City="'.$city.'" State="'.$state.'" County="" Zip="'.$zip.'" Program="RBS"></PropertyRequest></Eligibility>';
    $url_final = $url.''.$url_query;

    $ch = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$query);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

    $return = curl_exec ($ch);
    curl_close ($ch);

    echo $return;

?>

the only obvious problem I know of it that the server being queried uses GET instead of POST. Are there GET alternatives to this method?

Answer 1

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 0);

Curl uses GET by default. You were setting it to POST. You can override it if you ever need to with curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPGET, 1);

Answer 2

Use file_get_contents() function
file_get_contents

Or
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPGET, 1);