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You want to retrieve a URL with the POST method, not the default GET method. For example, you want to submit an HTML form.
Use the cURL extension with the CURLOPT_POST
option set:
$c = curl_init('http://www.example.com/submit.php');curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_POST, 1);curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, 'monkey=uncle&rhino=aunt');curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);$page = curl_exec($c);curl_close($c);
If the cURL extension isn't available, use the PEAR HTTP_Request
class:
require 'HTTP/Request.php';$r = new HTTP_Request('http://www.example.com/submit.php');$r->setMethod(HTTP_REQUEST_METHOD_POST);$r->addPostData('monkey','uncle');$r->addPostData('rhino','aunt');$r->sendRequest();$page = $r->getResponseBody();
Sending a POST method request requires special handling of any
arguments. In a GET request, these arguments are in the query string, but in
a POST request, they go in the request body. Additionally, the request needs
a Content-Length header that tells the server the
size of the content to expect in the request body.
Because of the argument handling and additional headers, you can't
use fopen( ) to make a POST request. If neither
cURL nor HTTP_Request are available, use the pc_post_request(
) function, shown in Example 11-1, which makes the connection to the
remote web server with fsockopen( ).
Example 11-1: pc_post_request( )
function pc_post_request($host,$url,$content='') {$timeout = 2;$a = array();if (is_array($content)) {foreach ($content as $k => $v) {array_push($a,urlencode($k).'='.urlencode($v));}}$content_string = join('&',$a);$content_length = strlen($content_string);$request_body = "POST $url HTTP/1.0Host: $hostContent-type: application/x-www-form-urlencodedContent-length: $content_length$content_string";$sh = fsockopen($host,80,&$errno,&$errstr,$timeout)or die("can't open socket to $host: $errno $errstr");fputs($sh,$request_body);$response = '';while (! feof($sh)) {$response .= fread($sh,16384);}fclose($sh) or die("Can't close socket handle: $php_errormsg");list($response_headers,$response_body) = explode("\r\n\r\n",$response,2);$response_header_lines = explode("\r\n",$response_headers);// first line of headers is the HTTP response code$http_response_line = array_shift($response_header_lines);if (preg_match('@^HTTP/[0-9]\.[0-9] ([0-9]{3})@',$http_response_line,$matches)) {$response_code = $matches[1];}// put the rest of the headers in an array$response_header_array = array();foreach ($response_header_lines as $header_line) {list($header,$value) = explode(': ',$header_line,2);$response_header_array[$header] = $value;}return array($response_code,$response_header_array,$response_body);}
Call pc_post_request( ) like this:
list($code,$headers,$body) = pc_post_request('www.example.com','/submit.php',array('monkey' => 'uncle','rhino' => 'aunt'));
Retrieving a URL with POST instead of GET is especially useful if the URL is very long, more than 200 characters or so. The HTTP 1.1 specification in RFC 2616 doesn't place a maximum length on URLs, so behavior varies among different web and proxy servers. If you retrieve URLs with GET and receive unexpected results or results with status code 414 ("Request-URI Too Long"), convert the request to a POST request.
See Fetching a URL with the GET Method for fetching a URL with
the GET method; documentation on curl_setopt( )
at http://www.php.net/curl-setopt and fsockopen(
) at http://www.php.net/fsockopen; the PEAR
HTTP_Request class at http://pear.php.net/package-info.php?package=HTTP_Request;
RFC 2616 is available at http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2616.html
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Created: March 27, 2003
Revised: March 27, 2003
URL: http://webreference.com/programming/php/chap11/1
