Download the contents of a URL in PHP even if it returns a 404

Question

I want to download the contents of a URL using PHP, even if the HTTP response code is 404. file_get_contents will error out, and I wasn\'t able to find an answe

Answer 1

By default file_get_contents only returns the content of HTTP 200 responses.

With curl you get the headers and the content separately.

As of PHP 5.0, you can also specify a context for file_get_contents, allowing you to do it without relying on url (See Gordon's answer).