David Sklar has a new post today with his solution to a common problem in PHP scripts that interact over HTTP.

From with a PHP program, I'd like to make an HTTP request and use the response body in my program. What could be simpler? PHP has a zillion ways to do it, not limited to: file_get_contents(), fopen() and fread(), fsockopen(), curl, and PEAR HTTP_Request.

One additional requirement that makes this slightly more interesting: I don't want to waste any memory on a response body that's too big. If I slurp in a giant request body, I might run over my memory_limit.

Here's what I came up with to solve this problem...

His solution uses the curl functionality inside of a class, making it a simple matter of making an object and issuing a get() call to reach out and grab that resource via a HTTP connection...