cURL - how to only read a website header?!

$url='http://softgroups.com';
$agent="SoftGroups Header Reader (http://softgroups.com)";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $agent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 0);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
$buffer=curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $buffer;
?>

I want onlt to get the header from the server
what;'s wrong!? this scrit return me the whole page, lol

 

try this:

<?php

$url='http://softgroups.com';
$agent="SoftGroups Header Reader (http://softgroups.com)";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $agent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 0);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
$buffer = curl_exec($ch);
$curl_info = curl_getinfo($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$header_size = $curl_info[header_size];
$header = substr($buffer, 0, $header_size);

echo $header;
?>

PHP:

$curl_info = curl_getinfo($ch); to capture the curl request info
$curl_info[header_size] will contain the curl request header size
$header = substr($buffer, 0, $header_size); to only get the header by the header size
finally $header will contain only the header information.

 

You may need to set the NOBODY flag to get only the headers.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);

PHP: