Passing $_POST values with cURL

Question

How do you pass $_POST values to a page using cURL?

Answer 1

Should work fine.

$data = array('name' => 'Ross', 'php_master' => true);

// You can POST a file by prefixing with an @ (for <input type="file"> fields)
$data['file'] = '@/home/user/world.jpg';

$handle = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
curl_exec($handle);

We have two options here, CURLOPT_POST which turns HTTP POST on, and CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS which contains an array of our post data to submit. This can be used to submit data to POST <form>s.

See:

• curl_init
• curl_setopt

---

@pix0r
Heh, need more coffee I think :) Thanks.

Answer 2

Check out this page which has an example of how to do it.

Answer 3

@Ross: typo, should be curl_exec($handle).

Perfectly simple example, thanks.

Answer 4

Ross has the right idea for POSTing the usual parameter/value format to a url.

I recently ran into a situation where I needed to POST some XML as Content-Type "text/xml" without any parameter pairs so here's how you do that:

    $xml = '<?xml version="1.0"?><stuff><child>foo</child><child>bar</child></stuff>';
    $httpRequest = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($httpRequest, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($httpRequest, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array("Content-Type:  text/xml"));
    curl_setopt($httpRequest, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
    curl_setopt($httpRequest, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);

    curl_setopt($httpRequest, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($httpRequest, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $xml);

    $returnHeader = curl_exec($httpRequest);

    curl_close($httpRequest);

In my case, I needed to parse some values out of the HTTP response header so you may not necessarily need to set RETURNTRANSFER or HEADER.