How to send Accept Encoding header with curl in PHP

Solution 1:

You can use CURLOPT_ENCODING:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, "");

The contents of the "Accept-Encoding: " header. This enables decoding of the response. Supported encodings are "identity", "deflate", and "gzip". If an empty string, "", is set, a header containing all supported encoding types is sent.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.curl-setopt.php

Alternatively, you can send an header:

$headers = array(
        'Accept: text/plain'
    );

To force the response in text/plain

Solution 2:

If you mean how to ungzip the response I did it like this:

<?php
....
$headers = array(
    "Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8",
    "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate",
    "Accept-Charset: utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3",
    "Accept-Language:en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4",
    "Connection: keep-alive",
);
....
$response = curl_exec($curl);
// check for curl errors
if ( strlen($response) && (curl_errno($curl)==CURLE_OK) && (curl_getinfo($curl, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE)==200) ) {
    // check for gzipped content
    if ( (ord($response[0])==0x1f) && (ord($response[1])==0x8b) ) {
        // skip header and ungzip the data
        $response = gzinflate(substr($response,10));
    }
}
// now $response has plain text (html / json / or something else)