Save CURL result in a variable PHP

Question

I'm new to the whole CURL library in PHP and managed to sucesfully get post data from a website using the following code:

 <?php
    $postcode="6942GJ"; 
    $huisnummer="8";
    $marktsegment="27";
    $aansluiting="-";
    $url="http://notimportantforstackoverflow.com"; 
    $postdata = "postcode=".$postcode."&huisnummer=".$huisnummer."&marktsegment=".$marktsegment."&aansluiting=".$aansluiting; 
    $ch = curl_init(); 
    curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); 
    curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postdata); 
    $status = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE); 
    $result = curl_exec ($ch); 
    curl_close($ch);
    ?>

Wich returns the following table:

 <table cellspacing="1" cellpadding="1" border="0"> <tbody><tr valign="bottom"> <td class="resultHeader"> Ean code aansluiting </td> <td class="resultHeader"> Straatnaam </td> <td class="resultHeader"> Huisnr. </td> <td class="resultHeader"> Huisnr. toev. </td> <td class="resultHeader"> Woonplaats </td> <td class="resultHeader"> Postcode </td> <td class="resultHeader"> Bijzondere aansluiting </td> <td class="resultHeader"> Markt segment </td> <td class="resultHeader"> Naam Netbeheerder </td> <td class="resultHeader"> Ean Netbeheerder </td> </tr> <tr height="1"> <td bgcolor="#FFFFFF" colspan="10"></td> </tr> <tr height="1"> <td bgcolor="#FEEAD3" colspan="10"></td> </tr> <tr height="2"> <td colspan="4"></td> </tr> <tr bgcolor="#E5F0E7"> <td class="resultData"> 871687140007253845 </td> <td class="resultData"> Pittelderstraat </td> <td class="resultData"> 8 </td> <td class="resultData"> &nbsp; </td> <td class="resultData"> DIDAM </td> <td class="resultData"> 6942GJ </td> <td class="resultData"> NEE </td> <td class="resultData"> GAS </td> <td class="resultData"> Liander NB </td> <td class="resultData"> 8716871000002 </td> </tr> </tbody></table> 

I want to work with the resulting data specifically the resulting string "Liander NB" I want to make a var out of this result like so $beheerder ="Liander NB"; But I don't know how to make a variable out of the resulting CURL data.

Answer 1

Use the CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER option to make curl_exec() return the response.

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postdata);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); 
$status = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE); 
$result = curl_exec ($ch); 

Then you can use DOMDocument to parse the HTML in the response, and its methods to find the information you want in the HTML.

Answer 2

Thanks Barmar, I've added the returntransfer. used a slightly diffrent approach with the PHPSimpleDOM parser but the result is the same, I just find it easier to work with as opposed to DomDocument.

<?php
$postcode     = ($_POST['postcode']);
$huisnummer   = ($_POST['huisnummer']);
$marktsegment = "27";
$aansluiting  = "-";
$url          = "xxxxxxxxx";
include('simple_html_dom.php');


$postdata = "postcode=" . $postcode . "&huisnummer=" . $huisnummer . "&marktsegment=" . $marktsegment . "&aansluiting=" . $aansluiting;

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postdata);


// Create a DOM object
$dom = new simple_html_dom();
// Load HTML from a string
$dom->load(curl_exec($ch));

$gasleverancier = $dom->find('td', 38)->plaintext; // zero based index selector

$gasleverancier = trim($gasleverancier);