Virtual PHP Form

Question

I have a PHP file that spits out a form. I want to call this PHP file server-side, (currently using "include"), fill it in, and submit it.

This is better so I don't have to meddle around with the actual form PHP, just deal with the presentation layer so the data gets understood by its own PHP file.

Is this possible? The form "method" is POST.

Answer 1

So you want to submit a form to yourself? Sounds like CURL will be the way to do it, but you'd be creating another HTTP session. Otherwise you can emulate the POST variables and call the form's action from your outside script.

Answer 2

You won't be able to fill in the form and submit it using include(). Submitting a form means that it has to go over HTTP to a web server, so what you're looking for is to emulate a POST request. PHP has a popular library called CURL to do this.

Try something like this:

$ch = curl_init('http://www.example.com/yourform.php');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, 'var1=value1&var2=value2&whatever=stuff');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$output = curl_exec($ch);

$output will contain the page output as if you had just submitted the form.

Answer 3

Based on your comments, it sounds like you're trying to simulate the submission of this form within the current request. I'm not sure if you can do that with cURL - I think each invocation of your PHP script executes independently, so the global variables from the current run of the script wouldn't be shared by the run which handles the cURL request.

The way I'd handle this would be to create a function to handle the form submission:

function handle_form($postdata) {
    // whatever you would normally do, just replace $_POST with $postdata
}

// to handle a normal form submission:
handle_form($_POST);

This way, you can simulate a submission of the form by just creating an array with the form field values:

$formvals['fieldname1'] = 'fieldvalue1';
$formvals['fieldname2'] = 'fieldvalue2';

and calling

handle_form($formvals);