Header only retrieval in php via curl | PHP CURL get content type from URL | PHP CURL retrieve headers information from URL

Response headers can contain valuable information and may help to keep your API responses simpler by separating the actual response data from accessory metadata.

For instance, when querying the API for a list of posts, the response body includes just the content but there are also some other valualbe information sent as headers:

The PHP code for the CURL request would look something like this:

$agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/65.0.3325.181 Safari/537.36 X-Client-Data: CIa2yQEIpLbJAQjBtskBCKmdygEIqKPKARiSo8oB"; $curl = curl_init(); curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url); curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FILETIME, true); curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true); curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, true); curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $agent); $header = curl_exec($curl); $info = curl_getinfo($curl); curl_close($curl);

Which will output as below:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2018 06:47:27 GMT Server: Apache/2.4.33 (Win32) OpenSSL/1.0.2n PHP/5.6.35 Last-Modified: Sun, 11 Feb 2018 16:39:41 GMT ETag: "5ae6f-564f2687e28f8" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 372335 Content-Type: application/pdf Array ( [url] => http://localhost/text-finder/download.pdf [content_type] => application/pdf [http_code] => 200 [header_size] => 265 [request_size] => 258 [filetime] => 1518367181 [ssl_verify_result] => 0 [redirect_count] => 0 [total_time] => 0.016 [namelookup_time] => 0.016 [connect_time] => 0.016 [pretransfer_time] => 0.016 [size_upload] => 0 [size_download] => 0 [speed_download] => 0 [speed_upload] => 0 [download_content_length] => 372335 [upload_content_length] => -1 [starttransfer_time] => 0.016 [redirect_time] => 0 [redirect_url] => [primary_ip] => ::1 [certinfo] => Array ( ) [primary_port] => 80 [local_ip] => ::1 [local_port] => 51877 ) HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2018 06:48:11 GMT Server: Apache/2.4.33 (Win32) OpenSSL/1.0.2n PHP/5.6.35 Last-Modified: Fri, 22 Jun 2018 04:18:28 GMT ETag: "92-56f3352eebe85" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 146 Content-Type: text/html Array ( [url] => http://localhost/text-finder/test2.html [content_type] => text/html [http_code] => 200 [header_size] => 253 [request_size] => 256 [filetime] => 1529641108 [ssl_verify_result] => 0 [redirect_count] => 0 [total_time] => 0.015 [namelookup_time] => 1.0E-6 [connect_time] => 0.015 [pretransfer_time] => 0.015 [size_upload] => 0 [size_download] => 0 [speed_download] => 0 [speed_upload] => 0 [download_content_length] => 146 [upload_content_length] => -1 [starttransfer_time] => 0.015 [redirect_time] => 0 [redirect_url] => [primary_ip] => ::1 [certinfo] => Array ( ) [primary_port] => 80 [local_ip] => ::1 [local_port] => 51944 )