Passing $_POST values with cURL

Question

How do you pass $_POST values to a page using cURL?

Answer 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.

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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.

1. $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); 

2. $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

Answer 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.