What are some best practices for handling cURL responses in PHP to prevent unexpected behavior such as automatic redirection or echoing?

When using cURL in PHP, it's important to handle responses appropriately to prevent unexpected behavior like automatic redirection or echoing of response data. To prevent automatic redirection, you can set the CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION option to false. To prevent echoing of response data, you can capture the output using CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER option and then handle it as needed.

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://example.com');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

$response = curl_exec($ch);

if($response === false){
    // Handle error
} else {
    // Process response data
}

curl_close($ch);