Question

I’m trying to fetch some contents about articles in a website via Curl, which I’m doing as follows :

    $url = 'http://lisboacity.olx.pt/oportunidade-pastor-alemao-7-meses-com-lop-iid-432402267';

    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 10);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322');
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
    $data = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    echo $data;

However, as you can see, the result is similar to this :

‹ÜW_oÛ6N€~F{hD’å?±“ØÜÄm‚&qZ;-Ö¢0h‰–™R¢JR¶Óapcèð}*ö²§)%Vœ&YÚ·†eêî~¿;òx<6×ö{{ƒ_N»èp|„NÏžî!ËvÝו=×Ýìg‚ªSòÐ@àXREyŒ™ëvO,dM”Jv\w6›9³ŠÃEè^º±ªË8—Ä TµW›ú•~À#" #mj“)¶¬=++{p‘ùÙ¨e)2Wmù,$Q­Ã~Ïn4jÛ¶g!÷.¨#‡)‹p‰26«>Í–M·.ƒTŽ8ö©ºp8›;‰r-¤°ÕJÂÆ£¢Š‘v/áB¥1 p@ÖN±T\ #Ñ'Žê("’H ŽÐQïÔ…#ƒ:10•(à £¨Ï%¼D]øá??ñ¦›d‘Å8"-+ Ò4Ñ3_ç:åÓÏÁ†ð’\[‘8]ÿÑëÎà zÕ;AOûý½ƒÞÓþA÷ðxíÑê£Uã»ôvS_pB“M ’aÙq€AŠX"øNa¦bx’;hŸÊäoCÃ0þjB3C@ Rå"™0Ãz€cž&ü{æäjúô '&äö'¤åUªõZ½î5êÀd2Ñø=„µ,Ç<†bÛìž3èGöØj±Ð{9Ø; ýÞÉ«,Æ]©.‘îO!Åb~–Á2 !°'uåÊj_Êÿ„œ=†žç;Æ$"Ó-3–­

I’ve also tried to load the url contents with PHP’s DomDocument class with the same result.

What could be causing this? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The output is gzip encoded. Try this option to decompress the content:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, ”);

CURLOPT_ENCODING: The contents of the "Accept-Encoding: " header. This enables decoding of the response. Supported encodings are "identity", "deflate", and "gzip". If an empty string, "", is set, a header containing all supported encoding types is sent.

from https://www.php.net/curl_setopt