I have noticed that cURL in PHP returns different data when told to output to a file via CURLOPT_FILE as it does when told to send the output to a string via CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER.
_RETURNTRANSFER seems to strip newlines and extra white space as if parsing it for display as standard HTML code. _FILE on the other hand preserves the file exactly as it was intended.
I have read through the documentation on php.net but haven’t found anything that seems to solve my problem. Ideally, I would like to have _RETURNTRANSFER return the exact contents so I could eliminate an intermediate file, but I don’t see any way of making this possible.
Here is the code I am using. The data in question is a CSV file with \r\n line endings.
function update_roster() { $url = 'http://example.com/'; $userID = 'xx'; $apikey = 'xxx'; $passfields = 'userID=$userID&apikey=$apikey'; $file = fopen('roster.csv','w+'); $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $passfields); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $file); $variable_in_question = curl_exec ($ch); curl_close ($ch); fclose($file); return $variable_in_question; } Turns out, the error is not in what was being returned, but in the way I was going about parsing it. \r\n is not parsed the way I expected when put in single quotes, switching to double quotes solved my problem. I was not aware that this made a difference inside function calls like that.
This works just fine:$cresult = split('\r\n', $cresult);
This does not: $cresult = split('\r\n', $cresult);
Turns out, the error is not in what was being returned, but in the way I was going about parsing it. \r\n is not parsed the way I expected when put in single quotes, switching to double quotes solved my problem. I was not aware that this made a difference inside function calls like that.
This works just fine:
$cresult = split('\r\n', $cresult);This does not:
$cresult = split('\r\n', $cresult);