Introduction to cURL

[shauny17]

Hi Guys!

I'm interested in incorporating cURL into my website (if it's relevant!). I'm wanting to grab a CSV file from our suppliers website and upload it to a MySQL database.

Firstly, is cURL what i want to be using? (I will be grabbing the file via. HTTP)?
and also, how would i do this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[bradgrafelman]

If it's just a CSV file on a website, cURL might be a little overkill (assuming allow_url_fopen is On)...

$csv = file_get_contents('http://thesite.com/path/to/file.csv');

Previous suggestions for importing CSV's into a SQL database would be to use MySQL's "LOAD DATA INFILE" syntax to load data from a .csv file.

To do this, you'd obviously have to write the contents of the CSV to a file on the server before running the "INFILE" SQL query. Otherwise, you might look at using file() instead and simply iterating through the .csv, INSERT'ing rows as you go.

[shauny17]

After trying to use file_get_contents it says https not found, so i done phpinfo() on my host, and unfortunately it is not there, so what line do i need to tell the host to change to support HTTPS file access?

[bradgrafelman]

Sounds like they don't have OpenSSL installed to handle HTTPS connections.

[shauny17]

Is there a way around this? can i use cURL or another function? or does it have to be the long way by downloading the file automatically?