scraping a secure page https in php

Question

Im trying to crawl a secure page (https) such as google with curl

but I seem to get no data back from my crawler

php function

function getDOM($url){
   $ch = curl_init($url);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RANGE, '0-100');
   $content = curl_exec($ch);
   curl_close($ch);
   echo $url."<br>";

   echo $content;


   $dom = new simple_html_dom();
   $dom->load($content);

   if($dom){
      return $dom;
   }

   return null;
}

getDOM("https://www.google.co.uk/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=14&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=crawling%20https#hl=en&gs_nf=1&pq=site:stackoverflow.com%20crawling%20https%20php&cp=6&gs_id=s&xhr=t&q=stackoverflow&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&oq=stacko&aq=0&aqi=g4&aql=&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=8baefeb740f734a5&biw=1280&bih=685");

is there anything I can do to crawl a https as I don't seem to have this problem with normal pages

Answer 1

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);

Add this to your code. This will allow any certificate to pass through, so it should be fine for your use (but not a good idea in general).