PHP open another webpage with POST data

Question

I'm new to PHP and I'm trying to do something that may be bad practise and may well be impossible. I'm basically just hacking something together to test my knowledge and see what PHP can do.

I have one webpage with a form that collects data. That is submited to a PHP script that does a bunch of processing - but doesn't actually display anything important. What I want is that once the processing is done, the script then tells the browser to open another page, where the results are displayed.

I know I can use header('Location: page.php'); but I can't work out how to provide POST data with this. How can I do that? Alternatively, is there another way to tell the browser to open another page?

EDIT: What I'm taking from the responses is that it's possible to do this using various hacks but I'd be better off to just have the processing and the display code in one file. I'm happy with that; this was an experiment more than anything.

Answer 1

You could use JavaScript as a dirty work-around:

<form id="redirect_form" method="post" action="http://someserver.com/somepage.php">
    <input type="hidden" name="field_1" value="<?php echo htmlentities($value_1); ?>">
    <input type="hidden" name="field_2" value="<?php echo htmlentities($value_2); ?>">
    <input type="hidden" name="field_3" value="<?php echo htmlentities($value_3); ?>">
</form>
<script type="text/javascript">
    document.getElementById('redirect_form').submit();
</script>

(the script should be below the form)

Answer 2

Is it really necessary to call another page after the processing is done? I'd probably do the following:

<form method="post" action="display.php">
...
</form>

display.php:

if ($_POST) {
    require_once(process.php);
    process($_POST);
    display_results;
}

with process.php containing the code necessary for processing the post request.

Alternatively, you could use something like the cURL library to pass the results of the processing to a page specified by yourself. Don't know if that's really what you're after though.