To auto fill a text area using php curl.

Question

Hi Friends,

We are trying to auto populate a form which is having a text area.

<textarea name="myarea"></textarea>

We can do it using curl however it is accepting only the part of the input text. If the content is too large then it accepts nothing. There is no restriction with respect to number of characters on the text area.

$area['myarea']=>"a large html code.................."
curl_setopt($ch,CURL_POSTFIELDS,$area);
curl_execute();

Please suggest the solution.

Answer 1

Are you sure you escaped the parameter correctly? Just use urlencode() for this purpose. Here is an example:

<?php
$url = 'http://localhost/';

$fields = array (
  'param1' => 'val1',
  'param2' => 'val2'
);

$qry = '';
foreach ($fields as $key => $value) {
  $qry .= $key . '=' . urlencode($value) . '&';
}
$qry = rtrim($qry, '&');

// Alternatively, you can also use $qry = http_build_query($fields, '');

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $qry);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

$result = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

var_dump($result);
?>

If you want to verify that the request was send properly, I would recommend netcat. Just set the URL to http://localhost:3333/ and then execute netcat using: $ nc -l -p 3333

As expected, the request looks like this: POST / HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost:3333 Accept: / Content-Length: 23 Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

param1=val1&param2=val2