Error with file_get_contents() [duplicate] - php

Question

How can I read a response from Stackoverflow API in PHP? The response is GZIP-ed. I found e.g. the following suggestion:
$url = "http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.1/questions/" . $question_id;
$data = file_get_contents($url);
$data = http_inflate($data);
but the function http_inflate() is not available on the installation that I am using.
Are there some other easy ways to accomplish it?

Answer 1

A cool way
http://www.php.net/manual/en/wrappers.compression.php
Notice the use of a stream wrapper, compress.zlib
$url = "compress.zlib://http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.1/questions/" . $question_id;
echo $data = file_get_contents($url, false, stream_context_create(array('http'=>array('header'=>"Accept-Encoding: gzip\r\n"))));
or using curl
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($ch, array(
CURLOPT_URL => $url
, CURLOPT_HEADER => 0
, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => 1
, CURLOPT_ENCODING => 'gzip'
));
echo curl_exec($ch);
edited--
other methods removed because they don't send an Accept-Encoding http header.

Answer 2

Use this to get gzip encoding json response its working like a charm
function get_gzip_json($url) {
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($ch, array(
CURLOPT_URL => $url,
CURLOPT_HEADER => 0,
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => 1,
CURLOPT_ENCODING => 'gzip',
));
$json = curl_exec($ch);
$json= mb_convert_encoding($json, "UTF-8", "UTF-8");
return $json;
}