Basic implementation

Copy-paste this function to get contents of a web served file / document from given URL.
Note: CURL needs to be enabled on your system.

function curl_get_contents( $url ) {
	$ch = curl_init($url);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);		
	$response = curl_exec($ch);
	$http_status = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
	curl_close($ch);
	return array($http_status,$response);
}

Usage example

$url = "https://www.invision-web.net/web/?source=PHP-CURL";
list($status,$html) = curl_get_contents( $url );
if ($status == 200) {
   echo "Got valid page! HTML follows:<br />".html_entities($html);
} else {
   echo "Got invalid status code for url = $url !<br/>";
}