Post to another page within a PHP script

Question

How can I make a post request to a different php page within a php script? I have one front end computer as the html page server, but when the user clicks a button, I want a backend server to do the processing and then send the information back to the front end server to show the user. I was saying that I can have a php page on the back end computer and it will send the information back to the front end. So once again, how can I do a POST request to another php page, from a php page?

Answer 1

Possibly the easiest way to make PHP perform a POST request is to use cURL, either as an extension or simply shelling out to another process. Here's a post sample:

// where are we posting to? $url = 'http://foo.com/script.php';  // what post fields? $fields = array(    'field1' => $field1,    'field2' => $field2, );  // build the urlencoded data $postvars = http_build_query($fields);  // open connection $ch = curl_init();  // set the url, number of POST vars, POST data curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, count($fields)); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postvars);  // execute post $result = curl_exec($ch);  // close connection curl_close($ch); 

Also check out Zend_Http set of classes in the Zend framework, which provides a pretty capable HTTP client written directly in PHP (no extensions required).

2014 EDIT - well, it's been a while since I wrote that. These days it's worth checking Guzzle which again can work with or without the curl extension.