How to retrieve attachment with http response header using PHP cURL library - php

Question

I'm trying to retrieve the raw attachment of an http request made using the php cURL library. Right now I get the html response but not the attachment.
There's a very similar question here that says use cURL option -j. I can't find the equivalent set_opt in the php cURL library.
When I make a request in the browser the desired attachment is referred to in the header information and the browser knows to download it automatically. In my script I just need the raw data of the attachment loaded into a variable.
How do I load the attachment data into a variable in php?
Header response from remote server:
Cache-Control:must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Content-Disposition:attachment; filename=exel_file.xls
Content-Length:65
Content-Transfer-Encoding:binary
Content-Type:application/download
Date:Thu, 30 Jun 2016 15:12:05 GMT
Expires:Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified:Thu, 30 Jun 2016 16:33:14 GMT
Pragma:public
Server:Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-Powered-By:PHP/5.2.17
My php cURL request:
$url = "https://subdomain.example.com?parameter=1";
$post = "post1=false&".
"post2=&".
"post3=false&".
"post4=&".
"post5=&".
"post6=1243123421";
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookieFile);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookieFile);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $userAgent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post);
$html = curl_exec($ch);
I've already tried accessing exel_file.xls directly at https://subdomain.example.com/exel_file.xls and to no avail.
UPDATE:
I did manage to directly reach the file eventually when I found it in Chrome developer tools. I filtered the network responses to "doc" and found the request tied to the attachment. The file was located at https://example.com/exel_file.xls instead of https://subdomain.example.com/exel_file.xls.

Answer 1

Set CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER to TRUE and set the content type.
<?php
$url = "http://slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds/13.37/multimedia/umplayer.tar.gz";
$opts = array(
CURLOPT_URL =>$url,
CURLINFO_CONTENT_TYPE => "text/xml",
CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER => TRUE,
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => TRUE
);
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($ch, $opts);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
$info = curl_getinfo($ch);
curl_close($ch);
header("Content-Type: application/x-gzip");
header("Content-disposition: attachment; filename=zipfile.tar.gz");
echo $data;
?>
Does this help