How to remove HTTP headers from CURL response?

Question

I have a php script that returns just plain text without any html. Now I want to make a cURL request to that script and I get the following response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:21:51 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.14 (Ubuntu)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.12-nmm2
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 6
Content-Type: text/html

6.8320

The actuall response is just 6.8320 as text without any html. I want to retrieve it from the response above by just removing the header information.

I already minified the script a bit:

$url = $_GET['url'];

if ( !$url ) {

  // Passed url not specified.
  $contents = 'ERROR: url not specified';
  $status = array( 'http_code' => 'ERROR' );

} else if ( !preg_match( $valid_url_regex, $url ) ) {

  // Passed url doesn't match $valid_url_regex.
  $contents = 'ERROR: invalid url';
  $status = array( 'http_code' => 'ERROR' );

} else {
  $ch = curl_init( $url );

  if ( strtolower($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD']) == 'post' ) {
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_POST, true );
    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $_POST );
  }

  curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true );
  curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true );
  curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true );

  curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $_GET['user_agent'] ? $_GET['user_agent'] : $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] );

  list( $header, $contents ) = preg_split( '/([\r\n][\r\n])\\1/', curl_exec( $ch ), 2 );

  $status = curl_getinfo( $ch );

  curl_close( $ch );
}

// Split header text into an array.
$header_text = preg_split( '/[\r\n]+/', $header );

if ( true ) {
  if ( !$enable_native ) {
    $contents = 'ERROR: invalid mode';
    $status = array( 'http_code' => 'ERROR' );
  }

  // Propagate headers to response.
  foreach ( $header_text as $header ) {
    if ( preg_match( '/^(?:Content-Type|Content-Language|Set-Cookie):/i', $header ) ) {
      header( $header );
    }
  }
  print $contents;
}

Any idea what I need to change to remove the header information from the response?

Solution 1

Just set CURLOPT_HEADER to false.

Solution 2

Make sure you put set the header flag:

        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true );
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, Constants::HTTP_TIMEOUT);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, Constants::HTTP_TIMEOUT);
        $response = curl_exec($ch); 

Do this after your curl call:

$header_size = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HEADER_SIZE);
$headerstring = substr($response, 0, $header_size);
$body = substr($response, $header_size);

EDIT: If you'd like to have header in assoc array, add something like this:

    $headerArr = explode(PHP_EOL, $headerstring);
    foreach ($headerArr as $headerRow) {
        preg_match('/([a-zA-Z\-]+):\s(.+)$/',$headerRow, $matches);
        if (!isset($matches[0])) {
            continue;
        }
        $header[$matches[1]] = $matches[2];
    }

Result print_r($header):

(
    [content-type] => application/json
    [content-length] => 2848
    [date] => Tue, 06 Oct 2020 10:29:33 GMT
    [last-modified] => Tue, 06 Oct 2020 10:17:17 GMT
)

Don't forget to close connection curl_close($ch);

Solution 3

Update the value of CURLOPT_HEADER to 0 for false

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

Solution 4

Just for a later use if anyone else needs. I was into same situation, but just need to remove header text, not content. The response i was getting in the header was (including white space):

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: private, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate
Content-Language: en
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 20:59:29 GMT
Expires: Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 GMT
Pragma: no-cache
Server: nginx
Vary: Cookie, Accept-Language, Accept-Encoding
transfer-encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive

I wanted to remove starting from HTTP till keep-alive with white space:

$contents = preg_replace('/HTTP(.*)alive/s',"",$contents);

that did for me.

Solution 5

If you are using nuSoap, you can access data without headers with $nsoap->responseData or $nsoap->response, if you want the full headers.

Just in case someone needs that.

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