A common cURL function that can be used for multiple purposes:

<?php
function LoadCURLPage($url, $agent = '', $cookie = "", $referer = "",
$post_fields = "", $return_transfer = 1, $follow_location = 1)
{
$ch = curl_init(); 

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

if($agent)
{
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $agent);
}

if($post_fields)
{
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post_fields);
}

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);

if($referer)
{
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $referer);
}

if($cookie)
{
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookie);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie);
}

$result = curl_exec ($ch);

curl_close ($ch);

return $result;
}

### Usage Examples ####

/* LOGIN (POST Method) */

$login_url = 'http://www.domain.com/login';

// Login
$post_info = array("username" => "username_here",
                          "password"   => "password_here");

$post_data = '';

foreach($post_info as $name => $value)
{
$post_data .= $name.'='.$value.'&';
}

$post_data = trim(substr($post_data, 0, -1));

$agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4)
 Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax)";
$cookie_file_path = 'temp/cookie.txt';
$result = LoadCURLPage($login_url, $agent, $cookie_file_path,
 $login_page, $post_data);

echo $result;

/* Fetch a web page (GET Method) */

$result = LoadCURLPage('http://www.yahoo.com/', $agent);

echo $result;
?>

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