PHP cURL, writing to file

Question

I want to try connecting to a remote file and writing the output from there to a local file, this is my function:

function get_remote_file_to_cache()
{

$the         


        

Answer 1

Let's try sending GET request to http://facebook.com:

$ curl -v http://facebook.com
* Rebuilt URL to: http://facebook.com/
* Hostname was NOT found in DNS cache
*   Trying 69.171.230.5...
* Connected to facebook.com (69.171.230.5) port 80 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.35.0
> Host: facebook.com
> Accept: */*
> 
< HTTP/1.1 302 Found
< Location: https://facebook.com/
< Vary: Accept-Encoding
< Content-Type: text/html
< Date: Thu, 03 Sep 2015 16:26:34 GMT
< Connection: keep-alive
< Content-Length: 0
< 
* Connection #0 to host facebook.com left intact

What happened? It appears that Facebook redirected us from http://facebook.com to secure https://facebook.com/. Note what is response body length:

Content-Length: 0

It means that zero bytes will be written to xxxx--all_good.txt. This is why the file stays empty.

Your solution is absolutelly correct:

$fp = fopen('file.txt', 'w');
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

All you need to do is change URL to https://facebook.com/.

Regarding other answers:

• @JonGauthier: No, there is no need to use fwrite() after curl_exec()
• @doublehelix: No, you don't need CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION for such a simple operation which is copying contents to file.
• @ScottSaunders: touch() creates empty file if it doesn't exists. I think it was intention of OP.

Seriously, three answers and every single one is invalid?