Resource ID #3 without using MySQL

Question

I'm constructing a brandchecker for my internship. One of the parts of it is where you enter a name, and the checker checks on Twitter if the username is taken or not. This is the code I made (file_get_contents doesn't work on my server):

<?php
$ch = curl_init(); 
$timeout = 0; 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://twitter.com/users/username_available?username=".$z); 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout); 
$twitter_contents = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

echo $ch;
?>

$z is defined above the code where I check Facebook for the username. It's defined as whatever people enter as their potential company name.

echo $ch; outputs Resource id #3. Everywhere, people are talking about how this is not an error, but a MySQL result that needs to be pulled through a var_dump() . But as you can see, I'm not pulling the data from MySQL, but from Twitter.com.

The Facebook checker uses cURL aswell, and it works flawlessly. And yes, I have switched out $ch with other variables.

Does anyone have a solution to my problem?

Edit: I just tried echo(var_dump($ch)); , and it returned resource(3) of type (Unknown)

Answer 1

You're echoing the wrong result. In your code you're loading the result into $twitter_contents by using the following code:

 $twitter_contents = curl_exec($ch);

If you would change your echo to this, it should work:

echo $twitter_contents;

To explain my answer a bit more, $ch is your Curl which is a function that's not returning the actual page. It's returning a resource, the curl_exec gets the actual content of the page and loads the result into a variable. Which you then can use to do other things.

---

Okay, after some comments, I came up with this and it worked... kinda..

    $url = "https://twitter.com/users/username_available?username=test"; 
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
    $result['contents']=curl_exec($ch);
    $result['info']=curl_getinfo($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    echo $result['contents'];

We were missing the 'CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER' which twitter needs.. apparently.