Are there best practices or alternative methods for fetching and displaying content from external websites in PHP without relying on file_get_contents() and potentially insecure methods?

When fetching and displaying content from external websites in PHP, it is important to avoid using file_get_contents() as it can be insecure and may not work in certain server configurations. Instead, a more secure method is to use cURL to fetch the content from the external website. cURL provides more control over the request and allows for better error handling.

// Initialize cURL session
$ch = curl_init();

// Set the URL to fetch
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.example.com');

// Set options for cURL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);

// Execute the cURL session
$response = curl_exec($ch);

// Check for errors
if($response === false){
    echo 'cURL error: ' . curl_error($ch);
}

// Close cURL session
curl_close($ch);

// Display the fetched content
echo $response;