Use PHP cURL to download and Excel file - php

Question

I've been trying for a few days to be able to call a url on a remote server that automatically downloads an Excel file when you put the url into a browser. I made a page locally that automatically downloads the file for testing, but I cannot get cURL to do it. The script returns no errors and says it was successful, but the file it writes to becomes corrupt and opens blank.
Here is the code...
$output_file = 'E:\Downloads\Export.xlsx';
$download_url = 'http://localhost/test/urlexport.php';
$ch = curl_init();
$out = fopen($output_file, 'w');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $out);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $download_url);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
fwrite($out, $output);
if(curl_exec($ch) === false)
{
echo 'Curl error: ' . curl_error($ch);
}
else
{
echo 'Operation completed without any errors';
}
if(curl_errno($ch)){
echo 'Curl error: ' . curl_error($ch);
}
curl_close($ch);
I've spent quite a bit of time researching this but have yet to find an answer that actually works. Any help is appreciated, thanks.

Answer 1

If you're not sure what you're doing - keep it simple.
Here's the simplest possible way to do what you're doing, which is downloading a file and then saving it to disk.
<?php
$output_file = 'E:\Downloads\Export.xlsx';
$download_url = 'http://localhost/test/urlexport.php';
$file = file_get_contents($download_url);
file_put_contents($output_file, $file);
If this doesn't work then your download url isn't doing what you think it's doing. Take a look at what's actually in the $output_file (open it in a text editor) - maybe it's some html.