Download the contents of a URL in PHP even if it returns a 404

By default file_get_contents only returns the content of HTTP 200 responses.

With curl you get the headers and the content separately.

As of PHP 5.0, you can also specify a context for file_get_contents, allowing you to do it without relying on url (See Gordon's answer).

You have to configure the stream wrapper to ignore errors:

ignore_errors boolean Fetch the content even on failure status codes. Defaults to FALSE

In other words, do

echo file_get_contents(
    'http://stackoverflow.com/foo/bar',
    false,
    stream_context_create([
        'http' => [
            'ignore_errors' => true,
        ],
    ])
);

and you will get the 404 page.

If you want this to be the default behavior for HTTP streams, use

stream_context_set_default(
    array('http' => array(
        'ignore_errors' => true)
    )
);

Any calls using the HTTP stream wrapper will use these settings then, e.g. you can simply do

echo file_get_contents('http://stackoverflow.com/foo/bar');

If you also want to get the response header, just do

print_r($http_response_header);

after the call. The variable is (re-)populated after each call with a http stream wrapper.