using curl with php - php

Question

I have an sms android app that works remotely using a http server, It need to get a formed url request like this :
http://server.com:9090/sendsms?phone=123456789&text=foobar&pass=123456
When i type that url in the browser address bar and hit enter, the app sends the sms.
I'm new to curl, and I dont know how to test it, here is my code so far:
$phonenumber= '12321321321'
$msgtext = 'lorem ipsum'
$pass = '1234'
$url = 'http://server.com:9090/sendsms?phone=' . urlencode($phonenumber) . '&text=' . urlencode($msgtext) . '&password=' . urlencode($pass);
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($curl, array(
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => 1,
CURLOPT_URL => $url
));
So my questions are, is the code correct? and how to test it?

Answer 1

Altough this is a simple GET, I cannot fully agree with hek2mgl. There are many situations, when you have to take care of timeouts, http response codes, etc. and this is what cURL is for.
This is a basic setup:
$handler = curl_init();
curl_setopt($handler, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($handler, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($handler, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
// curl_setopt($handler, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 10); // optional
// curl_setopt($handler, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10); // optional
$response = curl_exec($handler);
curl_close($handler);

Answer 2

If you can access the url using the address bar in browser, then it is a HTTP GET request. The simplest thing to do that in PHP would be using file_get_contents() since it can operate on urls as well:
$url = 'http://server.com:9090/sendsms?phone=123456789&text=foobar&pass=123456';
$response = file_get_contents($url);
if($response === FALSE) {
die('error sending sms');
}
// ... check the response message or whatever
...
Of course you can use the curl extension, but for a simple GET request, file_get_contents() will be the simplest and most portable solution.