This is a short PHP tutorial on how to return cURL output as a string. As you probably already know, the default behavior of cURL is to simply dump the response out onto the page. However, there is a quick fix for this.

The CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER option.

The curl_setopt function allows you to configure various options for a cURL request. One such option that we can set with this function is CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER.

Take the following PHP code as an example:

//Create a cURL handle.
$ch = curl_init('http://test.com');

//Execute the cURL transfer.
$result = curl_exec($ch);

If you run the snippet above, you will see that the output from the request is outputted directly. However, what if we wanted to assign the output to a variable instead?

Well, thankfully it’s pretty simple:

//Create a cURL handle.
$ch = curl_init('http://test.com');

//Set CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER to TRUE
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

//Execute the cURL transfer.
$result = curl_exec($ch);

In the example above, we set CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER to TRUE before we executed the cURL request. Note how I emphasized the word “before” there. This option must be configured before the cURL transfer is executed.

As a result, the curl_exec function will now return the response as a string instead of outputting it.

And that’s it! Hopefully, this solved your issue!