Hiding responses using PHP and Curl

I am reusing a curl function from a long time ago that is now acting differently than I remember. In this particular case, I'm authenticating a user's Twitter credentials. Here's the code as it stands now:

$cred = $_POST['twitter_username'].':'.$_POST['twitter_password'];
$url = "http://twitter.com/account/verify_credentials.json";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_GET, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $cred);
$result = curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);

This is working fine for the authentication, but is outputting the whole JSON response to the browser, which I don't want to do.

I'm not very familiar with curl. I tried setting CURLOPT_VERBOSE to 0 and false, but neither worked. I'm sure this is a pretty simple change somewhere, but I'm lose on what it is.

Thanks

From stackoverflow

• You need this option:

  curl_setopt(CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
  

  From the curl docs:

  CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER: TRUE to return the transfer as a string of the return value of curl_exec() instead of outputting it out directly.

  Evan : Awesome, thanks a ton!

  Randy : You can also always use ob_start() and ob_end_clean() or ob_get_clean() to temporarily trap all output from PHP, though Roborg's answer is the right way to go in this case.

• i wrote this function to help simplify my CURL requests

  function curl_http_request ($url, $options)
  {
      $handle = curl_init($url);
      curl_setopt_array($handle, $options);
      ob_start();
      $buffer = curl_exec($handle);
      ob_end_clean();
      curl_close($handle);
      return $buffer;
  }
  

  example of use

  $options = array(
      CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => TRUE,
      CURLOPT_USERPWD => $cred
  );
  
  curl_http_request($url, $options);