Over on his weblog today Ilia Alshanetsky has this new post information about some of the patches he's made to the cURL and parse_url functionality.

With the release of PHP 5.1.0b3 the dev tree has been closed for new features, allowing only bug fixes to facilitate the stabilization of the code for the upcoming (don't ask me when) 5.1.0 stable. This however created a unfortunate situation where PHP does not have a development tree for feature enchantments, so any improvements remain lingering on developer's boxes until development tree is once again available...

In the past few weeks I've been doing some work, which involved using parse_url() and cURL extension quite a bit and in the process came up with few improvements.

He mentions the enhancement of the cURL functionality to allow the display of the request sent by cURL to the server (a *huge* help) and the introduction of a curl_setopt_array function, allowing multiple config directives to be placed in one function call. As far as the parse_url function, its improvement is smaller, but still quite useful - a second optional parameter that allows the return of a specific piece of information from the URL...