cURL PHP GET not sending

Question

I am trying to send a CURL GET data to a certain website, but it seems it never goes through.

It needs to be something like the following:

GET /webservices/ssl/something.asmx HTTP/1.1
Host: http://www.thewebsite.com

I have tried the following, but it seems it doesnt go through:

$url = "http://www.thewebsite.com/webservices/ssl/something.asmx";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Host: www.thewebsite.com'));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION, 1.1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 20);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
$info = curl_getinfo($ch);
curl_close($ch);
print_r($result);
print_r($info);

The print_r($result) prints nothing. Not even error 404. My question is, is my curl correct? is there something that I miss? If not, could you please help me point out which one is the error and how to fix it?

Answer 1

This type of behavior usually happens when the remote server refuse to serve to request from agents like curl , wget . So we have to spoof the agent header.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)");

you don't need the following headers because curl handles that on its own.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Host: www.thewebsite.com'));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION, 1.1);

Apart from these if your site requires cookies Don't forget to include storage for cookies.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "cookie.txt");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "cookie.txt");

lastly if curl_exec returns FALSE check curl_error() for more information.

Answer 2

curl_init can sometimes have this behavior. Try adding a trailing slash '/' after the url.

Moreover, take into account that the function curl_init should return a FALSE if there are errors or you have an empty result like in your case.