How does cURL compare to fsockopen for handling HTTP requests in PHP?

cURL is generally considered to be more versatile and powerful than fsockopen for handling HTTP requests in PHP. cURL supports a wide range of protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and more, and provides a higher level of abstraction, making it easier to work with. Additionally, cURL has built-in support for features like cookies, authentication, and redirects, which can be more cumbersome to implement with fsockopen.

// Using cURL to make an HTTP GET request
$url = 'https://example.com/api';
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

echo $response;