title: Get external page content regardless of response type
body: <p>I'm working with an API that I recently noticed is failing in the code some of the time. I retrieve it via file_get_contents, and I'm getting the error "failed to open stream: HTTP request failed!"</p>
  
  <p>I plugged the URL into the browser directly and I get back a response, so I was confused. I thought to check the headers, and I noticed its coming up 403, and I have to assume that's why its failing? When its not 403, it does work. The 403 only comes up when the API authentication fails, and I have code to check if the XML that comes back says its a failure.</p>
  
  <p>So really the question is, how can I get back the code, regardless of if its a 403 or not. I was going to start using simplexml_load_file since I'm loading it into SimpleXML anyway, but if there is another method I can/should use, that advice would be great too.</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: I've attempted a simple curl request, but unless I've done it wrong, its also failed:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$curlObject = curl_init('https://api.eveonline.com/account/Characters.xml.aspx?userID=8166034&amp;characterID=91242713&amp;apiKey=B174C8B7B4364048B8A44B8C494904059D50B942BB4748FD907FF1DBF3F18282');
  curl_setopt($curlObject, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
  $fileContents = curl_exec($curlObject);
  curl_close($curlObject);
  
  echo $fileContents;
  </code></pre>