CURL + POST + multipart/form-data

Question

I am trying to scrape a website using PHP, CURL and POST method in order to submit a form before web scraping the page. The problem I am experiencing is that there is connected with POST method: no data is submitted to the server, so the scraped webpage doesn't contain what I am looking for.

I quit sure the problem is connected with the form type: enctype="multipart/form-data". How can I manage this POST request, considering that the form is multipart/form-data? Do I have to encode the post_string in a special way?

Here's the code I'm using:

 function curl($url) {

//POST string
$post_string="XXXX";

$options = Array(
        CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => TRUE,  
        CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => TRUE, 
        CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER => TRUE, 
        CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 120,  
        CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 120, 
        CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10, 
        CURLOPT_USERAGENT => "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1a2pre) Gecko/2008073000 Shredder/3.0a2pre ThunderBrowse/3.2.1.8",  
        CURLOPT_URL => $url, 
        CURLOPT_CAINFO => dirname(__FILE__)."/cacert.pem",

        CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => $post_string,

    );

    $ch = curl_init(); 
    curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);   
    $data = curl_exec($ch); 
    curl_error($ch);
    curl_close($ch);       
    return $data;   
}

$scraped_page = curl("XXXURLXXX");    
echo $scraped_page; 

Thank you!

Answer 1

Set the CURLOPT_POST to true:

CURLOPT_POST = true

Then fill your post fields like this 'setup':

$postfields = array();
$postfields['field1'] = 'value1';
$postfields['field2'] = 'value2';
CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => $postfields

---

If value is an array, the Content-Type header will be set to multipart/form-data.

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