cURL HTTP request from WikiMedia API not working - php

Question

I've read tons of cURL tutorials (I'm using PHP) and there's always the same basic code, which doesn't work for me! No specific errors, just no result.
I want to make a HTTP request from Wikipedia and get the result in JSON format.
Here's the code :
$handle = curl_init();
$url = "http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=Albert%20Einstein&prop=info&format=json";
curl_setopt_array($handle,
array(
CURLOPT_URL => $url,
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true
)
);
$output = curl_exec($handle);
if (!$output) {
exit('cURL Error: '.curl_error($handle));
}
$result= json_decode($output,true);
print_r($result);
curl_close($handle);
Would like to know what I'm doing wrong.

Answer 1

Your code is correct but it seems Wikipedia doesn't send back the data when using PHP curl (maybe some headers or other parameters must be set for it to work).
If all you need is to retrieve some data though, you can simply use file_get_contents which works fine:
$output = file_get_contents("http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=Albert%20Einstein&prop=info&format=json");
echo $output;
Edit:
Just for information, I found what the issue is. When running curl -v on that URL, the following comes up:
* Trying 91.198.174.192...
* Connected to fr.wikipedia.org (91.198.174.192) port 80 (#0)
> GET /w/api.php?action=query&titles=Albert%20Einstein&prop=info&format=json HTTP/1.1
> Host: fr.wikipedia.org
> User-Agent: curl/7.47.0
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
< Date: Wed, 17 May 2017 13:54:31 GMT
< Server: Varnish
< X-Varnish: 852298595
< X-Cache: cp3031 int
< X-Cache-Status: int
< Set-Cookie: WMF-Last-Access=17-May-2017;Path=/;HttpOnly;secure;Expires=Sun, 18 Jun 2017 12:00:00 GMT
< Set-Cookie: WMF-Last-Access-Global=17-May-2017;Path=/;Domain=.wikipedia.org;HttpOnly;secure;Expires=Sun, 18 Jun 2017 12:00:00 GMT
< X-Client-IP: 86.214.172.57
< Location: https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=Albert%20Einstein&prop=info&format=json
< Content-Length: 0
< Connection: keep-alive
<
* Connection #0 to host fr.wikipedia.org left intact
So what's happening is that the actual content is on the https url, not http, so by requesting https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=Albert%20Einstein&prop=info&format=json it should work directly.
The reason it works with file_get_contents is because in this case the redirection is done automatically.