php using CURL to grab whois record

Question

Example: http://www.whois.net/whois/hotmail.com

When open in browser, output is shown.

When using curl call, it show nothing.

What's wrong? I want to return whole page result, then use regular expression to retrieve data at Expiration Date: 29-Mar-2015 00:00:00 line.

$postfields= null; 
$postfields["noneed"] = "";
$queryurl= "http://www.whois.net/whois/hotmail.com";

$results= getUrlContent($postfields, $queryurl);
echo $results;


 function getUrlContent($postfields,$api_url)
 {  
  if( !extension_loaded('curl') ){die('You need to load/activate the cURL extension (http://www.php.net/cURL).'); }

  $ch = curl_init();  
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $api_url); // set the url to fetch
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0); // set headers (0 = no headers in result)
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); // type of transfer (1 = to string)
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10); // time to wait in seconds
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postfields);  
  $content = curl_exec($ch); // make the call  
  curl_close($ch);  
  return $content;
 } 

Answer 1

Whois.net checks user agent. So add these to your function before you call curl_exec

$useragent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1";
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $useragent);