Use PHP and cURL to retrieve URL contents (with a few options)

url_get_contents - a function to retrieve the contents of a remote URL with PHP and the cURL library.[break]Because I've used this function for a few different projects, it's grown to be a bit of a monster, however you can still use it in a pretty basic way, i.e. url_get_contents("http://www.example.com");

I'm not a professional programmer by any means, and I suffer from lack of organisation of common code that I use. So, I'm going to post a few of the things that I hunt for here, to save myself a bit of a search. Hopefully they may be useful to someone else too.

Anyway, here's the function, with comments that should hopefully explain the logic.

<?php

# url_get_contents function by Andy Langton: https://andylangton.co.uk/
function url_get_contents($url,$useragent='cURL',$headers=false,
$follow_redirects=false,$debug=false) {

# initialise the CURL library
$ch = curl_init();

# specify the URL to be retrieved
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);

# we want to get the contents of the URL and store it in a variable
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);

# specify the useragent: this is a required courtesy to site owners
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $useragent);

# ignore SSL errors
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);

# return headers as requested
if ($headers==true){
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER,1);
}

# only return headers
if ($headers=='headers only') {
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY ,1);
}

# follow redirects - note this is disabled by default in most PHP installs from 4.4.4 up
if ($follow_redirects==true) {
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1); 
}

# if debugging, return an array with CURL's debug info and the URL contents
if ($debug==true) {
$result['contents']=curl_exec($ch);
$result['info']=curl_getinfo($ch);
}

# otherwise just return the contents as a variable
else $result=curl_exec($ch);

# free resources
curl_close($ch);

# send back the data
return $result;
}

?>