PHP Curl - 400 Bad Request - php

Question

I know this is a common problem when using Curl but I have not found a solution after looking through StackOverflow and Google.
I've tried different User Agents and I'm getting different errors:
The requested URL returned error: 400 Bad Requestresource(19) of type (Unknown)
The requested URL returned error: 400 Bad Requeststring(42) of type (Unknown) (I noticed the 42 refers to the '=' in the $target_url)
depending on some of the modifications I make to my code below, however none has pointed me in the direction to solve this problem.
I appreciate any advice:
$target_url = "http://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/stats/pdisplay.php?pid=170307";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$target_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
$html = curl_exec($ch);
if ($html === false) $html = curl_error($ch);
echo stripslashes($html);
curl_close($ch);
var_dump($ch);
*** I should note that I'm actually reading the url (and a few others) from a file, so maybe there is something wrong with the format of the url?
I've done this before and had no problem with it, but now I'm stumped.
I read each line/url and place it into an array which I loop through later on.
*** If I hardcode the url then it works fine, but for some reason reading it from the file produces the error.

Answer 1

Don't use stripslashes() use preg_replace() to filter the URLs
<?php
$target_url="http://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/stats/pdisplay.php?pid=170307";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$target_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT ,4);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
$html = curl_exec($ch);
$html = preg_replace("#(<\s*a\s+[^>]*href\s*=\s*[\"'])(?!http)([^\"'>]+) ([\"'>]+)#",'$1'.$target_url.'$2$3', $html);
echo $html;
curl_close($ch);
var_dump($ch);
?>