This PHP snippet fetches HTML from a url, follows redirects, works on HTTPS sites and emulates Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). Perfect for ripping cont… uh… gathering information from other sites!

function getData($url){
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://www.google.com/");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 5);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
    $output = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    return $output;
}