Do I use fopen or curl to load an XML file given a URL in PHP

Question

I have an XML file I can get via a URL. I know I can get the file using fopen, but sometimes I've seen scripts use curl. Is there an advantage to using curl over fopen to get XML files?

Answer 1

allow_url_fopen, which is required if you want to open a remote file with fopen, can be disabled ; so, there are situations in which fopen('http://...') is not possible.
Note : in this answer, I say "fopen", but it's exactly the same with all PHP functions that can access remote files : fopen, file_get_contents, simplexml_load_file, ...

On the other hand, curl is an extension, and is not always enabled either.

One nice with curl is that it's pretty easy to configure, and there are a lot of existing options (see curl_setopt)

To configure the way fopen accesses remote files, it's a bit trickier -- you'll generally have to work with streams (see here, for example) ; and, generally speaking, there are more people knowing curl than there are developpers mastering streams.

Safest way -- especially if your application will be deployed to servers on which you are not administrator, and cannot re-configure :

• Try one solution
• And, if it doesn't work, try the other one

Answer 2

fopen is simpler to use, and I think not all server setups support curl out of the box. If fopen works fine for you it's probably your best choice.

Answer 3

Well, if you are going to use SimpleXML to load the file you can use

simplexml_load_file($filename);

However, some servers will restrict loading urls from this function. In this case you would be restricted to cURL.