file_get_contents_curl.php

<?php

// http://25labs.com/alternative-for-file_get_contents-using-curl/

function file_get_contents_curl($url, $retries=5)
{
    $ua = 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)';

    if (extension_loaded('curl') === true)
    {
        $ch = curl_init();

        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); // The URL to fetch. This can also be set when initializing a session with curl_init().
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE); // TRUE to return the transfer as a string of the return value of curl_exec() instead of outputting it out directly.
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5); // The number of seconds to wait while trying to connect.
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $ua); // The contents of the "User-Agent: " header to be used in a HTTP request.
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, TRUE); // To fail silently if the HTTP code returned is greater than or equal to 400.
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE); // To follow any "Location: " header that the server sends as part of the HTTP header.
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, TRUE); // To automatically set the Referer: field in requests where it follows a Location: redirect.
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 5); // The maximum number of seconds to allow cURL functions to execute.
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 5); // The maximum number of redirects

        $result = trim(curl_exec($ch));

        curl_close($ch);
    }

    else
    {
        $result = trim(file_get_contents($url));
    }        

    if (empty($result) === true)
    {
        $result = false;

        if ($retries >= 1)
        {
            sleep(1);
            return file_get_contents_curl($url, $retries--);
        }
    }    

    return $result;
}

?>