How to get response using cURL in PHP

Just use the below piece of code to get the response from restful web service url, I use social mention url.

$response = get_web_page("http://socialmention.com/search?q=iphone+apps&f=json&t=microblogs&lang=fr");
$resArr = array();
$resArr = json_decode($response);
echo "<pre>"; print_r($resArr); echo "</pre>";

function get_web_page($url) {
    $options = array(
        CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,   // return web page
        CURLOPT_HEADER         => false,  // don't return headers
        CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,   // follow redirects
        CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS      => 10,     // stop after 10 redirects
        CURLOPT_ENCODING       => "",     // handle compressed
        CURLOPT_USERAGENT      => "test", // name of client
        CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER    => true,   // set referrer on redirect
        CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 120,    // time-out on connect
        CURLOPT_TIMEOUT        => 120,    // time-out on response
    ); 

    $ch = curl_init($url);
    curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);

    $content  = curl_exec($ch);

    curl_close($ch);

    return $content;
}

The crux of the solution is setting

CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true

then

$response = curl_exec($ch);

CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER tells PHP to store the response in a variable instead of printing it to the page, so $response will contain your response. Here's your most basic working code (I think, didn't test it):

// init curl object        
$ch = curl_init();

// define options
$optArray = array(
    CURLOPT_URL => 'http://www.google.com',
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true
);

// apply those options
curl_setopt_array($ch, $optArray);

// execute request and get response
$result = curl_exec($ch);

If anyone else comes across this, I'm adding another answer to provide the response code or other information that might be needed in the "response".

http://php.net/manual/en/function.curl-getinfo.php

// init curl object        
$ch = curl_init();

// define options
$optArray = array(
    CURLOPT_URL => 'http://www.google.com',
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true
);

// apply those options
curl_setopt_array($ch, $optArray);

// execute request and get response
$result = curl_exec($ch);

// also get the error and response code
$errors = curl_error($ch);
$response = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);

curl_close($ch);

var_dump($errors);
var_dump($response);

Output:

string(0) ""
int(200)

// change www.google.com to www.googlebofus.co
string(42) "Could not resolve host: www.googlebofus.co"
int(0)