Split cURL header info into array - php

Question

Consider the following PHP cURL command:
$url = 'http://bit.ly/faV1vd';
$_h = curl_init();
curl_setopt($_h, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
curl_setopt($_h, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($_h, CURLOPT_HTTPGET, 1);
curl_setopt($_h, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($_h, CURLOPT_DNS_USE_GLOBAL_CACHE, false );
curl_setopt($_h, CURLOPT_DNS_CACHE_TIMEOUT, 2 );
$return = curl_exec($_h);
This returns:
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved
Server: nginx
Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2012 12:48:07 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Connection: keep-alive
Set-Cookie: _bit=4f9d3887-00215-020af-2f1cf10a;domain=.bit.ly;expires=Fri Oct 26 12:48:07 2012;path=/; HttpOnly
Cache-control: private; max-age=90
Location: http://www.macroaxis.com/invest/market/VZ--Sat-Feb-26-06-16-35-CST-2011?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Length: 209
I want to split the header info into an array, as follows
[Status] => HTTP/1.1 301 Moved,
[Server] => nginx,
[Date] => Sun, 29 Apr 2012 12:48:07 GMT,
...
[Content-Length] => 209
So:
- the first line (HTTP/1.1 301 Moved) should be the value of [Status]
- all other header info should be split on :
I'm not succeeding in splitting the header info:
explode("\r\n\r\n", $return);
explode("\r\n", $return);
This doesn't split the header into an array (to further split on :, etc. as expected. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

The answer by Altaf Hussain is good but does not support a case where the header response contains a ':'. i.e. X-URL: http://something.com. In this case the $myarray will only contain ('X-URL' => 'http')
This can be fixed by adding the limit parameter and setting it to 2. In addition, there should be a space after the colon. So the full solution with the bug fix is:
$myarray=array();
$data=explode("\n",$return);
$myarray['status']=$data[0];
array_shift($data);
foreach($data as $part){
$middle=explode(": ",$part,2);
$myarray[trim($middle[0])] = trim($middle[1]);
}
print_r($myarray);

Answer 2

Use this to split your header into an array
$myarray = array();
$data = explode("\n",$return);
$myarray['status'] = $data[0];
array_shift($data);
foreach($data as $part){
$middle = explode(":",$part);
$myarray[trim($middle[0])] = trim($middle[1]);
}
print_r($myarray);
As well as use curl_setopt($_h, CURLOPT_NOBODY, 1);
if you need to return only header.
More info can be found here
http://altafphp.blogspot.com/2012/04/get-http-headers-of-any-site-using-curl.html

Answer 3

cURL already supports a callback function for parsing the headers.
CURLOPT_HEADERFUNCTION : A callback accepting two parameters. The first is the cURL resource,
the second is a string with the header data to be written. The header
data must be written by this callback. Return the number of bytes
written.
function handle_headers($curl, $header_line)
{
list($name, $value) = explode(": ", $header_line, 2);
//do something with name/value...
return strlen($header_line);
}
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADERFUNCTION, "handle_headers");

Answer 4

You could also just split it into maximum of 2
explode("\r\n\r\n",$result,2);
and remember to setup followlocation and max redirect if you want the actual url to fetch
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 5);