How to remove HTTP headers from CURL response? - php

Question

I have a php script that returns just plain text without any html. Now I want to make a cURL request to that script and I get the following response:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:21:51 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.14 (Ubuntu)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.12-nmm2
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 6
Content-Type: text/html
6.8320
The actuall response is just 6.8320 as text without any html. I want to retrieve it from the response above by just removing the header information.
I already minified the script a bit:
$url = $_GET['url'];
if ( !$url ) {
// Passed url not specified.
$contents = 'ERROR: url not specified';
$status = array( 'http_code' => 'ERROR' );
} else if ( !preg_match( $valid_url_regex, $url ) ) {
// Passed url doesn't match $valid_url_regex.
$contents = 'ERROR: invalid url';
$status = array( 'http_code' => 'ERROR' );
} else {
$ch = curl_init( $url );
if ( strtolower($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD']) == 'post' ) {
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_POST, true );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $_POST );
}
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $_GET['user_agent'] ? $_GET['user_agent'] : $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] );
list( $header, $contents ) = preg_split( '/([\r\n][\r\n])\\1/', curl_exec( $ch ), 2 );
$status = curl_getinfo( $ch );
curl_close( $ch );
}
// Split header text into an array.
$header_text = preg_split( '/[\r\n]+/', $header );
if ( true ) {
if ( !$enable_native ) {
$contents = 'ERROR: invalid mode';
$status = array( 'http_code' => 'ERROR' );
}
// Propagate headers to response.
foreach ( $header_text as $header ) {
if ( preg_match( '/^(?:Content-Type|Content-Language|Set-Cookie):/i', $header ) ) {
header( $header );
}
}
print $contents;
}
Any idea what I need to change to remove the header information from the response?

Answer 1

Just set CURLOPT_HEADER to false.

Answer 2

Make sure you put set the header flag:
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, Constants::HTTP_TIMEOUT);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, Constants::HTTP_TIMEOUT);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
Do this after your curl call:
$header_size = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HEADER_SIZE);
$headerstring = substr($response, 0, $header_size);
$body = substr($response, $header_size);
EDIT:
If you'd like to have header in assoc array, add something like this:
$headerArr = explode(PHP_EOL, $headerstring);
foreach ($headerArr as $headerRow) {
preg_match('/([a-zA-Z\-]+):\s(.+)$/',$headerRow, $matches);
if (!isset($matches[0])) {
continue;
}
$header[$matches[1]] = $matches[2];
}
Result print_r($header):
(
[content-type] => application/json
[content-length] => 2848
[date] => Tue, 06 Oct 2020 10:29:33 GMT
[last-modified] => Tue, 06 Oct 2020 10:17:17 GMT
)
Don't forget to close connection curl_close($ch);

Answer 3

Update the value of CURLOPT_HEADER to 0 for false
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

Answer 4

Just for a later use if anyone else needs. I was into same situation, but just need to remove header text, not content. The response i was getting in the header was (including white space):
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: private, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate
Content-Language: en
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 20:59:29 GMT
Expires: Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 GMT
Pragma: no-cache
Server: nginx
Vary: Cookie, Accept-Language, Accept-Encoding
transfer-encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
I wanted to remove starting from HTTP till keep-alive with white space:
$contents = preg_replace('/HTTP(.*)alive/s',"",$contents);
that did for me.

Answer 5

If you are using nuSoap, you can access data without headers with $nsoap->responseData or $nsoap->response, if you want the full headers.
Just in case someone needs that.

Answer 6

If for some reason you have to curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1); to get cookies for example, the following worked for me. Not sure if it's 100% reliable but worth a try
$foo = preg_replace('/HTTP(.*)html/s',"",$curlresult);

Answer 7

$content = null;
$ch = curl_init();
$rs = curl_exec($ch);
if (CURLE_OK == curl_errno($ch)) {
$content = substr($rs, curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HEADER_SIZE));
}
curl_close($ch);
echo $content;

Answer 8

If someone already saved the curl response to a file (like me) and therefore don't know how big the header was to use substr, try:
$file = '/path/to/file/with/headers';
file_put_contents($file, preg_replace('~.*\r\n\r\n~s', '', file_get_contents($file)));

Answer 9

Just do not set the curl_header in the curl request or set it to z or false
like this
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);

Answer 10

Just don't set CURLOPT_HEADER!