file_get_contents()/curl getting unexpected page - php

Question

I'm doing some scraping with php. I've been extracting data including link to the next relevant page so the whole thing is automatic. The problem is that I seem to be getting a page which is slightly modified compared to what I would expect using that URL in my browser (for e.g. the dates are different).
I've tried using curl and get_file_contents but both get the wrong file.
At the moment I am using:
$url = "http://www.example.com";
$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5;
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
url_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
$temp = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
What is going on here?
UPDATE:
I've tried imitating a browser using the following code but still unsuccessful. I find this bizarre.
function get_url_contents($url){
$crl = curl_init();
$timeout = 10;
$header=array(
'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 Firefox/3.6.12',
'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
'Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5',
'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate',
'Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7',
'Keep-Alive: 115',
'Connection: keep-alive',
);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
curl_setopt ($crl, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt ($crl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($crl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
curl_setopt ($crl, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, FALSE);
curl_setopt ($crl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, FALSE);
$ret = curl_exec($crl);
curl_close($crl);
return $ret;
}
Further update:
Seems that the site is using my location to discriminate. Is there a locale option?

Answer 1

Can be many things...
Server may render pages differently based on cookies and header sent
Server may render pages differently based on existing pre-conditions and states on the server
You may have a proxy in between that modifies the content based on user-agent and since you don't have a specific user-agent (such as CURL browser) then your proxy is sending back different content
This is just a few things that could happen!