Question

I have a large array of URLS similar to this:

 $nodes = array(
    'http://www.example.com/product.php?page=1&sortOn=sellprice',
    'http://www.example.com/product.php?page=2&sortOn=sellprice',
    'http://www.example.com/product.php?page=3&sortOn=sellprice'
);

The cURL manual states here (http://curl.haxx.se/docs/manpage.html) that i can use square brackets ‘[]’ to specify multiple urls. Used in the above example this would be similar to this:

'http://www.example.com/product.php?page=[1-3]&sortOn=sellprice'

So far i have been unable to reference this correctly. This is the complete code segment I’m currently trying to utilize this with:

$nodes = array(
    'http://www.example.com/product.php?page=1&sortOn=sellprice',
    'http://www.example.com/product.php?page=2&sortOn=sellprice',
    'http://www.example.com/product.php?page=3&sortOn=sellprice' 
);

$node_count = count($nodes);

$curl_arr = array();
$master = curl_multi_init();

for($i = 0; $i < $node_count; $i++)
{
    $url =$nodes[$i];
    $curl_arr[$i] = curl_init($url);
    curl_setopt($curl_arr[$i], CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_multi_add_handle($master, $curl_arr[$i]);
}

do {
    curl_multi_exec($master,$running);
} while($running > 0);

echo "results: ";
for($i = 0; $i < $node_count; $i++)
{
    $results = curl_multi_getcontent  ( $curl_arr[$i]  );
    echo( $i . "\n" . $results . "\n");
echo 'done';

I can’t seem to find any more documentation on this. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The docs you linked are the manpage for the cURL command line binary and do not apply to libcurl, which is what PHP uses. If you want to retrieve multiple URLs simultaneously in PHP, the correct way to do it is with the curl_multi_* functions, as you seem to be aware based on the code sample you show.