Question

This is equivalent of question: Download CSV directly into Python CSV parser but in php. Basically I’m looking for a library offering interface capable of doing things I do with python just in a few lines of code:

h = httplib2.Http('.cache')
url = 'http://financials.morningstar.com/ajax/ReportProcess4CSV.html?t=' + code + '&region=AUS&culture=en_us&reportType='+ report + '&period=12&dataType=A&order=asc&columnYear=5&rounding=1&view=raw&productCode=usa&denominatorView=raw&number=1'
headers, data = h.request(url)
return data

I need to download and parse csv file but I would like to avoid using cURL and its low level interface. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Not quite 3 lines:

function getURL($url){
    $ch = curl_init($url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    $ret = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    return $ret;
}

Or I guess you could use file_get_contents, if you REALLY don’t like cURL…

file_get_contents($url);

Also, take a look at str_getcsv() for converting the strings from the above functions into an array with data from the CSV file.