dave-jay

function _gu($url) {
    $ch = curl_init();
    $timeout = 5;
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:18.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0');
    $data = curl_exec($ch);

dave-jay

<?php
function _e(&$a,$return=NULL){
    return isset($a) ? $a : $return;
}

// usages

# scenario #1
$field = _e($_GET['field']);
# if field is not set, it will be set to null