PHP: programatically submit form and get contents of resulting page?

Question

How would I programatically submit a form using PHP (I assume using curl?) and get the file markup of the resulting page?

Answer 1

See here for related detail on this:

http://www.html-form-guide.com/php-form/php-form-submit.html

e.g:

<?php
   $url = 'http://localhost/curl/1.php';
   $params = "keyword=123&zxczxc=333"; //you must know what you want to post
   $user_agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)";
   $ch = curl_init();
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST,1);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$params);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $user_agent);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);

   $result=curl_exec ($ch);
   curl_close ($ch);

   echo "Results: <br>".$result;
?>

1.php content:

<?
print_r($_POST);
?>

Related Questions on SO:

https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=php+form+curl

Posting a textarea form with cURL

Using PHP & curl to post an html form that includes a file

php cURL , fill a remote form

Other articles:

http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/sending-post-form-data-with-php-curl.html

http://davidwalsh.name/execute-http-post-php-curl

http://curl.haxx.se/mail/curlphp-2004-04/0013.html

http://phpsense.com/php/submitting-forms-using-php-curl.html

http://www.maheshchari.com/submit-a-form-to-remote-server-with-php-curl/