Thank you for sharing this. I was wondering why my result was 1.
To get around this in a safe way, this is how I check if the result is valid.
$ch = curl_init(); /// initialize a cURL session
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$xmlResponse = curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
if (!is_string($xmlResponse) || !strlen($xmlResponse)) {
return $this->_set_error( "Failure Contacting Server" );
} else {
return $xmlResponse;
}