README

This library wraps PHP's native cURL extension functions with objects, for better code readability and testability.

Why? We wanted to lay an object oriented foundation for PHP.Gt/Fetch, our PHP implementation of the web's fetch API that uses cURL to create asynchronous HTTP calls with promises.

Example usage: Get a JSON object from a remote source

When working with HTTP calls, it is extremely common to work with JSON. This library removes the need of a lot of boilerplate code by buffering the output of exec() calls for easy retrieval later with output() or outputJson().

Example using PHP.Gt/Curl:

$curl = new Curl("https://catfact.ninja/fact");
$curl->exec();
$json = $curl->outputJson();
echo "Here's a cat fact: {$json->getString("fact")}";
echo PHP_EOL;
echo "The fact's length is {$json->getInt("length")} characters.";
echo PHP_EOL;

Same example using PHP's native curl_* functions:

// Using native functionality to achieve the same:
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://catfact.ninja/fact");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
if(false === $result) {
	die("CURL error: " . curl_error($ch));
}
$json = json_decode($result);
if(is_null($json)) {
	die("JSON decoding error: " . json_last_error_msg());
}

// Note: No type checks are made on the `fact` and `length` properties here.
echo "Here's a cat fact: {$json->fact}";
echo PHP_EOL;
echo "The fact's length is {$json->length} characters.";
echo PHP_EOL;