cURL on PHP being curiously silent - php

Question

OK so after struggling for a while trying to get cURL to fetch a password protected XML file, and getting absolutely nothing from it, I tried dumbing down my code to see what would work. It turns out nothing. Here's my code:
$ch = curl_init("www.google.com");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
And cURL is SILENT. I mean nothing prints to the page. I definitely have it enabled, my phpinfo looks like this:
cURL support enabled
cURL Information libcurl/7.16.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8a zlib/1.2.3
Running php 5.2 on a Windows NT server. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The key is in this line:
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
You're telling cURL to return the result of the transfer instead of echoing it (the default). So either remove that line, or do something like this:
$result = curl_exec($ch);
if ($result === false) {
echo "Error: " . curl_error($ch);
} else {
echo $result;
}
If you're getting an SSL error as you point out in your comments, you can set another option on the cURL handle to disable checking the certificate:
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);