Passing $_POST values with cURL

Solution 1:

Should work fine.

$data = array('name' => 'Ross', 'php_master' => true);

// You can POST a file by prefixing with an @ (for <input type="file"> fields)
$data['file'] = '@/home/user/world.jpg';

$handle = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
curl_exec($handle);
curl_close($handle)

We have two options here, CURLOPT_POST which turns HTTP POST on, and CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS which contains an array of our post data to submit. This can be used to submit data to POST <form>s.

It is important to note that curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data); takes the $data in two formats, and that this determines how the post data will be encoded.

$data as an array(): The data will be sent as multipart/form-data which is not always accepted by the server.

$data = array('name' => 'Ross', 'php_master' => true);
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);

$data as url encoded string: The data will be sent as application/x-www-form-urlencoded, which is the default encoding for submitted html form data.
```
$data = array('name' => 'Ross', 'php_master' => true);
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($data));
```

I hope this will help others save their time.

See:

curl_init
curl_setopt

Solution 2:

Ross has the right idea for POSTing the usual parameter/value format to a url.

I recently ran into a situation where I needed to POST some XML as Content-Type "text/xml" without any parameter pairs so here's how you do that:

$xml = '<?xml version="1.0"?><stuff><child>foo</child><child>bar</child></stuff>';
$httpRequest = curl_init();

curl_setopt($httpRequest, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($httpRequest, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array("Content-Type:  text/xml"));
curl_setopt($httpRequest, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($httpRequest, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);

curl_setopt($httpRequest, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($httpRequest, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $xml);

$returnHeader = curl_exec($httpRequest);
curl_close($httpRequest);

In my case, I needed to parse some values out of the HTTP response header so you may not necessarily need to set CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER or CURLOPT_HEADER.

Solution 3:

Another simple PHP example of using cURL:

<?php
    $ch = curl_init();                    // Initiate cURL
    $url = "http://www.somesite.com/curl_example.php"; // Where you want to post data
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);  // Tell cURL you want to post something
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "var1=value1&var2=value2&var_n=value_n"); // Define what you want to post
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); // Return the output in string format
    $output = curl_exec ($ch); // Execute

    curl_close ($ch); // Close cURL handle

    var_dump($output); // Show output
?>

Example found here: http://devzone.co.in/post-data-using-curl-in-php-a-simple-example/

Instead of using curl_setopt you can use curl_setopt_array.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.curl-setopt-array.php

Solution 4:

Check out this page which has an example of how to do it.

Solution 5:

$query_string = "";

if ($_POST) {
    $kv = array();
    foreach ($_POST as $key => $value) {
        $kv[] = stripslashes($key) . "=" . stripslashes($value);
    }
    $query_string = join("&", $kv);
}

if (!function_exists('curl_init')){
    die('Sorry cURL is not installed!');
}

$url = 'https://www.abcd.com/servlet/';

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, count($kv));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $query_string);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, FALSE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, FALSE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);

$result = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);