Parsing any webpage using CURL on PHP - php

Question

Is it possible to write a PHP function that returns HTML-string of any possible link the same way the browser does? Example of links: "http://google.com", "", "mywebsite.com", "somesite.com/.page/nn/?s=b#85452", "lichess.org"
What I've tried:
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSLVERSION, 3);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 20);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13');
$data = curl_exec($curl);
if(curl_errno($curl)){
echo 'Curl error: ' . curl_error($curl);
}
echo $data;
curl_close($curl);
Sadly enough, for some links this code returns blank page because of SSL or any other stuff, but for some links it works.
Or is there any alternative to CURL? I just do not understand why php cannot retrieve any html out of the box.

Answer 1

CURL may fail on SSL sites if you're running an older version of PHP. Make sure your OS and PHP version are up-to-date.
You may also opt to use file_get_contents() which works with URLs and is generally a simpler alternative if you just want to make simple GET requests.
$html = file_get_contents('https://www.google.com/');