The actual implementation is going to depend on a half dozen factors. The people who set up the catalog will be able to tell you how the relevant portion of content is acquired... and you must acquire it the same way.
For example, let's say that the two sites are on the same server and the catalog is constructed like this:
display header
display table wrapper
open database, read content from table where ID = ####
display content
display close of table
display footer
If that's the case, then just re-use those two lines (read content / display content) in your script. You're getting the raw content instead of getting the formatted content.
But maybe the catalog is on a different server. Not a problem. The catalog gets its content from somewhere. So think of the catalog web pages as content displayers. They read the content, add some format to it, and display it. What you're going to do on the other server with the catalog is build a new displayer that simply doesn't add the formatting.
For example, imagine on the catalog server you have a script called fancy_display.php whose job is to read some content and display it wrapped in headers and tables and whatnot. What you're going to do on that server is make a new script called plain_display.php that does exactly the same job as fancy_display except that it leaves out the parts about headers and tables. So now, instead of scraping from a page called fancy_display, you do the job the same way you were trying to do it earlier (using cURL) except you "scrape" from plain_display instead and you can skip the steps about parsing the content out of $result. In this new model, $result IS the content itself. (No real users would ever see plain_display.php... this is just a script you've made for internal use only for transporting raw, unformatted content from one server to another.) And I put "scrape" in quotes because it's not really scraping when the content you're gathering from the other server is exactly what you need and doesn't need to be teased out of a messy $result string.
Yet another way to do it would be to make a database user on the old catalog server that is allowed to access the database from the new server. That is, on your new site, instead of using cURL to get the formatted page from the catalog server, you will use a database command to connect from new server -> catalog server and acquire the data.
This message is filled with tons of speculation because I don't really know how your catalog was set up, how many servers you are using, if the content exists in a database or in static text files, or which database you are using, or even which languages, operating system(s), or display tools you might be using. The general idea is to develop a more direct approach for getting the content. Exactly how you do that will depend on what you already have built for the catalog.