PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

Basic curl example

Once you've compiled PHP with cURL support, you can begin using the cURL functions. The basic idea behind the cURL functions is that you initialize a cURL session using the curl_init(), then you can set all your options for the transfer via the curl_setopt(), then you can execute the session with the curl_exec() and then you finish off your session using the curl_close(). Here is an example that uses the cURL functions to fetch the example.com homepage into a file:

Example #1 Using PHP's cURL module to fetch the example.com homepage

<?php

$ch = curl_init("http://www.example.com/");
$fp = fopen("example_homepage.txt", "w");

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

curl_exec($ch);
if(curl_error($ch)) {
    fwrite($fp, curl_error($ch));
}
curl_close($ch);
fclose($fp);
?>

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User Contributed Notes 1 note

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Roberto Braga ¶

9 years ago

It is important to notice that when using curl to post form data and you use an array for CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS option, the post will be in multipart format



<?php

$params=['name'=>'John', 'surname'=>'Doe', 'age'=>36];

$defaults = array(

CURLOPT_URL => 'http://myremoteservice/', 

CURLOPT_POST => true,

CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => $params,

);

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt_array($ch, ($options + $defaults));

?>

This produce the following post header:



--------------------------fd1c4191862e3566

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="name"



Jhon

--------------------------fd1c4191862e3566

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="surnname"



Doe

--------------------------fd1c4191862e3566

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="age"



36

--------------------------fd1c4191862e3566--



Setting CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS as follow produce a standard post header



CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => http_build_query($params),



Which is:

name=John&surname=Doe&age=36



This caused me 2 days of debug while interacting with a java service which was sensible to this difference, while the equivalent one in php got both format without problem.

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