curl php Operation timed out after 120000 milliseconds with 234570 bytes received - php

Question

My php curl request is timing out as i expected it to and giving me the error message: "Operation timed out after 120000 milliseconds with 234570 bytes received"
But how do i get the bytes received despite its timeout?
$url = "example.com";
$timeout = 120;
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $timeout);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FORBID_REUSE, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
$curl_page = curl_exec($ch);
$error = curl_error($ch);
curl_close($ch);
var_dump($curl_page, $error);

Answer 1

don't use CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER. use CURLOPT_FILE instead, eg
$outfileh=tmpfile();
$outfile=stream_get_meta_data($outfileh)['uri'];
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_FILE,$outfileh);
curl_exec($ch);
$curl_page=file_get_contents($outfile);
(and don't forget to fclose($outfileh), or you'll have a resource leak, and keep in mind that with tmpfile()'s, fclose() will delete the file for you as well... the good news is, php will clean it up anyway at the end of execution, though) - another option is to use CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION, eg
$curl_page = '';
curl_setopt ( $ch, CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION, function ($ch, $recieved) use (&$curl_page) {
$curl_page .= $recieved;
return strlen ( $recieved );
} );
curl_exec($ch);
which has the advantage of less IO, this will be handled enterly in memory, unlike the CURLOPT_FILE approach, which may start writing it to disk, depending on the OS IO cache.