No response from cURL function - php

Question

I have written the following function, which was code I used somewhere else and modified slightly to work as a function (using $url in function parameters):
function curl2str($url) {
$cURL = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($cURL, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($cURL, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
$data = curl_exec($cURL);
curl_close($cURL);
return $data;
}
I simply want a function to return a URL into a string, for a quick and easy API. The URL I am passing it is valid and works fine when I put it into a browser. I am calling it like so:
<?=curl2str("**valid URL here**");?>
For some reason it is just returning false. What am I doing wrong?
update
When I put this questions URL into as $url, I get a response. But when I use my custom URL, which works fine in the browser, and simply display's a list of files in the directory, I get bool:false.
update 2
It would seem that any domain works fine, apart from the one that I am trying to access. It just so happens that this is a root domain on the same server, I am running this script from a subdomain, but because of basedir_restrictions I cannot access a folder from the subdomain. So I wrote a little php to get the contents of the folder, and output it to the browser as a serialized array (JSON is not installed). But I cannot get a response from this root domain at all. It works fine in the browser, just not in cURL. And everything else works fine in cURL.
:(

Answer 1

Try this code into your function:
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
if(curl_errno($ch))
echo 'Curl error: '.curl_error($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
Note: curl_errno($ch); return error number>0 if any error occurs from cURL and use curl_error($ch); to see what is the error from cURL.

Answer 2

I use this function:
function curl($url, $cookie = false, $post = false, $header = false, $follow_location = false, $referer=false,$proxy=false)
{
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $referer);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, $header);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, $proxy);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, $follow_location);
if ($cookie) {
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIE, $cookie);
}
if ($post) {
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post);
}
$response = curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $response;
}