Unfortunately, I cannot use either fopen or file_get_contents, so my working script has become a broken one using cURL:
$ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, C
I believe that curl_exec($ch) will not return a string unless you use curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true) first.
curl_exec($ch)
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true)