How can the use of cURL compared to file_get_contents impact the security and reliability of extracting HTML code from external sources in PHP?

Using cURL instead of file_get_contents can improve security and reliability when extracting HTML code from external sources in PHP. cURL provides more control and options for handling HTTP requests, such as setting headers, handling redirects, and handling SSL certificates. This can help prevent security vulnerabilities like CSRF attacks or man-in-the-middle attacks, and also provide more reliable handling of different types of responses from external sources. 

// Using cURL to extract HTML code from an external source
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://example.com');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$html = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

// Check if cURL request was successful
if ($html === false) {
    // Handle error
} else {
    // Process the HTML code
    echo $html;
}

Keywords

cURL file_get_contents security reliability HTML extraction

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