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Question

How to obtain the returned cookie after a POST in PHP?

Answer 1

+2 A:

You can use this code to do what you want. Pretty much you're just simulating a client when you do this by writing a HTTP request to a page and then processing the response headers that it sends back. This is also how you would build a proxy server, but that is sort of what you're doing.

Let me know if you need any help.

//
// OPEN SOCKET TO SERVER
//

$_socket = @fsockopen($host, $port, $err_no, $err_str, 30);

//
// SET REQUEST HEADERS
//

$_request_headers  = '... CONSTRUCT FULL HEADERS HERE ...'; 

fwrite($_socket, $_request_headers);

//
// PROCESS RESPONSE HEADERS
//

$_response_headers = $_response_keys = array();
$line = fgets($_socket, 8192);

while (strspn($line, "\r\n") !== strlen($line))
{
    @list($name, $value) = explode(':', $line, 2);
    $name = trim($name);
    $_response_headers[strtolower($name)][] = trim($value);
    $_response_keys[strtolower($name)] = $name;
    $line = fgets($_socket, 8192);
}

sscanf(current($_response_keys), '%s %s', $_http_version, $_response_code);

if (isset($_response_headers['set-cookie']))
{
    // DO WHAT YOU WANT HERE
}

For reference, you can find similar code in PHProxy that goes into much more detail. It will create headers for you, process response headers, and more. If you find that this example doesn't do everything you need, you should reference that software.

gnucom 2010-07-20 23:07:42

I am a little bit confused with some of the information above: 1) what should i replace (host, port, etc) with? ||| 2) what should i replace the information in (request_headers) with, what do you mean by constructing a full header because i just want to pull the information and not post a header. ((THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE HELP))

2010-07-20 23:12:58

I understand that I will send the request through the headers i believe but not sure how to set up the parameters through the header (if let's say the website takes the parameters username and password. (Thanks again :))

2010-07-20 23:19:29

First, you'll need to familiarize yourself with how HTTP headers work. You're going to write your $request_url as one large string that contains all the request information. See example here http://www.jmarshall.com/easy/http/#postmethod. Second, if you want to get any information out of the server (like a set-cookie response) you NEED to make a request, so this is what you want to do. In your code, after you write the request, the server will write back a response (and in that response will be your set-cookie field - which is also detailed in HTTP header tutorials). Good Luck.

gnucom 2010-07-20 23:23:19

gnucom 2010-07-20 23:31:27

so I supplied this in the header and it gave me an error: "Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\nContent-Length: 61\nusername=something%40email.comWarning: fgets(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /path/auth.php on line 18(line 18: $line = fgets($_socket, 8192);

2010-07-20 23:33:36

gnucom 2010-07-21 00:07:00

The returned array is empty but that's something I will investigate, thank you so much for the help :)

2010-07-21 00:17:14

Yay, great. Glad to help.

gnucom 2010-07-21 00:40:40

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How to obtain the returned cookie after a POST in PHP?

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