how to send HTTP request by GET method in PHP to another website

Question

I'm developing a web application for sending SMS to mobile from website like 160by2.

I can prepare the URL required for the HTTP GET request as mentioned in the API provided by the SMS Gateway provider smslane.com, here is the link for the API.

how to send the HTTP request from PHP?

I used cURL for that purpose but the response is not displayed. here is the code i used,

<?php 
$url="http://smslane.com/vendorsms/pushsms.aspx?user=abc&password=xyz&msisdn=919898123456&sid=WebSMS&msg=Test message from SMSLane&fl=0";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1" );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url );  
$content = curl_exec( $ch );
$response = curl_getinfo( $ch );
curl_close ( $ch );
echo $content;
?>

fsockopen() was not used because port number unknown, mailed the support team for port number. (if any code for fsockopen through GET method is invited :). )

are there any other methods for doing this?

any help is welcome.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT

Could any one tell me is there any other way to send this HTTP Request except cURL and if possible give code for that.

I'm asking this because the current cURL code taking too much time for execution and fails after 60 seconds, i increased max_execution_time to 120 in php.ini on my local system even though it is not doing good for me :( .

Answer 1

Your problem is the way you are constructing the URL. The spaces you are including in the query string will result in a malformed request URL being sent.

Here is an example that replicates your circumstances:

request.php:

<?php
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 
    'http://your_server/response.php?foo=yes we can&baz=foo bar'
);
$content = curl_exec($ch);
echo $content;

response.php:

<?php
print_r($_GET);

The output of request.php is:

Array
(
    [foo] => yes
)

The reason for this is the query string is not properly encoded and the server interpreting the request assumes the URL ends at the first space, which in this case is in the middle of the query: foo=yes we can&baz=foo bar.

You need to build your URL using http_build_query, which will take care of urlencoding your query string properly and generally makes the code look a lot more readable:

echo http_build_query(array(
    'user'=>'abc',
    'password'=>'xyz',
    'msisdn'=>'1234',
    'sid'=>'WebSMS',
    'msg'=>'Test message from SMSLane',
    'fl'=>0
));

You also need to set CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);