Question

I can use straight forward

`curl $url -H $headers -d $data`

Or I can use the cURL wrapper functionality and some more wrappers like the ones Zend Framework gives.

I find it easy to use the straight forward approach, am I missing a benefit here? I use cURL for getting JSON responses, so no complex parsing is needed.

Answer 1

• The API lets you set various options that might not have command-line equivalents.
• Error handling is cleaner since you get an error code and can ask for an error string. Getting the errors from the command’s return code and stderr is messier.

Btw your backtick version should probably use escapeshellarg on the $url, $headers and $data especially if any of them depend on user input.