Are there any best practices or guidelines to follow when using cUrl to fetch external websites in PHP?

When using cUrl to fetch external websites in PHP, it is important to follow best practices to ensure security and efficiency. Some guidelines to follow include validating user input, setting appropriate cUrl options such as timeouts and SSL verification, and handling errors gracefully.

$url = "https://www.example.com";

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, true);

$response = curl_exec($ch);

if(curl_errno($ch)){
    echo 'Curl error: ' . curl_error($ch);
}

curl_close($ch);

// Process the response data as needed