Why cURL Fails To fetch Page ?

[saversites]

Folks,

Why is cURL failing to fetch the page ? All this time it worked.
Echoes "Page fetching problem!"

<?php 
	//Required PHP Files.
include 'config.php';
include 'header.php';
	//1). Set Banned Words.
$banned_words = array("asshole", "nut", "bullshit");
	$url = "http://devshed.com";
// 2). $curl is going to be data type curl resource.
$curl = curl_init();
	// 3). Set cURL options.
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "$url");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
	// 4). Run cURL (execute http request).
$result = curl_exec($curl);
	if (curl_errno($curl))
{
    echo 'Error:' . curl_error($curl);
}
	$response = curl_getinfo( $curl );
	//If page is fetched then replace banned words found on page.
if($response['http_code'] == '200' )
{   
    $regex = '/\b';
    $regex .= implode('\b|\b', $banned_words);
    $regex .= '\b/i';
    $substitute = 'BANNED WORD REPLACED';
    $clean_result = preg_replace($regex, $substitute, $result);
    //Present the banned words filtered webpage.
    echo $clean_result;
}
else
{
    //Show error if page fetching failed.
    echo "Page fetching problem!";
    exit();
}

?>

[saversites]

I added this line today ...

 

echo "$response[http_code]";

Result I get is this: 403.

Googling, I see that the page devshed.com is forbidden. Since I can view the page on y browser and not manage to get cURL to fetch it then I'm guessing devshed.com has put a measurement in place to foil proxies.
Switched the url to another site and that got fetched.
last night, even google did not get fetched and so I suspected maybe I accidently deleted something from my code but could not spot the deletion. Hence, opened this thread to see if anyone else spots it.
Now, I understand, both devshed.com and google were foiling the cURL fetch or proxy fetch.

How well did I do ?
 

[saversites]

I now get error that variable $url is undefined on line 72.

Notice: Undefined variable: url in C:\xampp\htdocs\......

If you check line 72, it says between double quotes:

$url = "http://devshed.com"; 

Even if I change the url to a url who's page cURL is able to fetch, I still get the same error.
This does not work either, with single quotes:

$url = 'http://devshed.com'; 

This is very very strange! If the $url variable has not been defined then how is cURL able to fetch the page who's url is on the $url variable value ?
Even though page gets fetched, I still see the error! Weird!

[administrator]

Hi,

If you are getting HTTP 403 Forbidden status , it could be the website blocking unknown bots - curl would be perceived as such. 

Stef