Mimicking an ajax call with Curl PHP

Question

I'm scraping a site using curl (via PHP) and some information I want is a list of products which is by default only showing the first few ones. The rest is passed to the user when they click a button to get the full list of products, which triggers an ajax call to return that list.

Here is in a nutshell the JS they use:

headers['__RequestVerificationToken'] = token;
$.ajax({
type: "post",
url: "/ajax/getProductList",
dataType: 'html',
data: JSON.stringify({ historyPageIndex: 1, displayPeriod: 0, productsType: All }),
contentType: 'application/json; charset=utf-8',
success: function (result) {
    $(target).html("");
    $(target).html(result);
},
beforeSend: function (XMLHttpRequest) {
    if (headers['__RequestVerificationToken']) {
        XMLHttpRequest.setRequestHeader("__RequestVerificationToken", headers['__RequestVerificationToken']);
    }
}
});

Here is my PHP script:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $userAgent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 10);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookieLocation);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookieLocation);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://www.domain.com/Applications/ViewProducts');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, 'https://www.domain.com/');
$webpage = curl_exec($ch);
$productsType = trim(find_by_pattren($webpage, '<input id="productsType" name="productsType" type="hidden" value="(.*?)"'));
$token = trim(find_by_pattren($webpage, '<input name="__RequestVerificationToken" type="hidden" value="(.*?)"'));

$postVariables = 'productsType='.$productsType.
'&historyPageIndex=1
&displayPeriod=0
&__RequestVerificationToken='.$token;
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postVariables);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://www.domain.com/ajax/getProductList');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, 'https://www.domain.com/Applications/ViewProducts');
$webpage = curl_exec($ch);

This produces an error page with the site. I think the main reasons could be that:

• They check whether it's an ajax request (no clue how to fix that)

• The token needs to be in the header and not in the post variables

Any idea?

EDIT: here is the working code:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $userAgent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 10);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookieLocation);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookieLocation);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://www.domain.com/Applications/ViewProducts');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, 'https://www.domain.com/');
$webpage = curl_exec($ch);
$productsType = trim(find_by_pattren($webpage, '<input id="productsType" name="productsType" type="hidden" value="(.*?)"'));
$token = trim(find_by_pattren($webpage, '<input name="__RequestVerificationToken" type="hidden" value="(.*?)"'));

$postVariables = json_encode(array('productsType' => $productsType,
'historyPageIndex' => 1,
'displayPeriod' => 0));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array("X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest", "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8", "__RequestVerificationToken: $token"));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postVariables);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://www.domain.com/ajax/getProductList');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, 'https://www.domain.com/Applications/ViewProducts');
$webpage = curl_exec($ch);

Answer 1

To set the request verification token as a header, more closely mimic an AJAX request, and set the content-type to JSON, use CURLOPT_HEADER.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array("X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest", "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8", "__RequestVerificationToken: $token"));

I also notice that you're superfluously setting CURLOPT_POST to false on line 7 of your code, and that the post data you're sending isn't in JSON format. You should have:

$postVariables = '{"historyPageIndex":1,"displayPeriod":0,"productsType":"All"}';