curl unable to download webpages - php

Question

I am trying to open homepages of websites and extract title and description from it's html markup using curl with php, I am successful in doing this to an extent, but many websites are there I am unable to open. My code is here:
function curl_download($Url){
if (!function_exists('curl_init')){
die('Sorry cURL is not installed!');
}
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $Url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $output;
}
// $url is any url
$source=curl_download($url);
$d=new DOMDocument();
$d->loadHTML($source);
$title=$d->getElementsByTagName("title")->item(0)->textContent)
$domx = new DOMXPath($d);
$desc=$domx->query("//meta[#name='description']")->item(0);
$description=$desc->getAttribute('content');
?>
This code is working fine for most websites but there are many whome it doesn't even able to open. What can be the reason?
When I tried getting headers of those websites using get_headers function, its working fine, but these are not being opened using curl. Two of these websites are blogger.com and live.com.

Answer 1

Replace:
$output = curl_exec($ch);
with
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSLVERSION, 3);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
if (!$output) {
echo curl_error($ch);
}
and see why Curl is failing.
It's a good idea to always check the result of function calls to see if they succeeded or not, and to report when they fail. While a function may work 99.999% of the time, you need to report the times it fails, and why, so the underlying cause can be identified and fixed, if possible.