HTTPS Post Reuqest via PHP and Cookies

Question

I am kinda new to PHP however I used JSP a lot before (I have quite information) and everything was easier with Java classes. So, now, I want to perform a POST request on a HTTPS page (not HTTP) and need to get returned cookies and past it to another GET request and return the final result. Aim is to make a heavy page for mobile phones more compatible to view in a mobile browser by bypassing the login page and directly taking to the pages which are also served in an ajax user interface. I am stuck, my code does not work, it says it is Bad Request.

Bad Request

Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand. Reason: You're speaking plain HTTP to an SSL-enabled server port. Instead use the HTTPS scheme to access this URL, please.

<?php
$content = '';
$flag = false;
$post_query = 'SOME QUERY'; // name-value pairs
$post_query = urlencode($post_query) . "\r\n";
$host = 'HOST';
$path = 'PATH';
$fp = fsockopen($host, '443');

if ($fp) {
fputs($fp, "POST $path HTTP/1.0\r\n");
fputs($fp, "Host: $host\r\n");
fputs($fp, "Content-length: ". strlen($post_query) ."\r\n\r\n");
fputs($fp, $post_query);
while (!feof($fp)) {
$line = fgets($fp, 10240);
if ($flag) {
$content .= $line;
} else {
$headers .= $line;
if (strlen(trim($line)) == 0) {
$flag = true;
}
}
}
fclose($fp);
}
echo $headers;
echo $content;
?>

Answer 1

From past experience, I've never used PHP's internal functions like fsocketopen() for external data posting. The best way to do these actions are using CURL, which gives much more ease and is massively more powerful for developers to leverage.

for example, look at these functions http://php.net/curl_setopt

and look at the one with URL, POST, POSTDATA, and COOKIESFILES which is for .JAR, which you get then retrieve and that you can use file_get_contents() to send the data using GET.