I'm using PHP's function file_get_contents()
to fetch contents of a URL and then I process headers through the variable $http_response_header
.
Now the problem is that some of the URLs need some data to be posted to the URL (for example, login pages).
How do I do that?
I realize using stream_context I may be able to do that but I am not entirely clear.
Thanks.
Sending an HTTP POST request using file_get_contents
is not that hard, actually : as you guessed, you have to use the $context
parameter.
There's an example given in the PHP manual, at this page : HTTP context options (quoting) :
$postdata = http_build_query(
array(
'var1' => 'some content',
'var2' => 'doh'
)
);
$opts = array('http' =>
array(
'method' => 'POST',
'header' => 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
'content' => $postdata
)
);
$context = stream_context_create($opts);
$result = file_get_contents('http://example.com/submit.php', false, $context);
Basically, you have to create a stream, with the right options (there is a full list on that page), and use it as the third parameter to file_get_contents
-- nothing more ;-)
As a sidenote : generally speaking, to send HTTP POST requests, we tend to use curl, which provides a lot of options an all -- but streams are one of the nice things of PHP that nobody knows about... too bad...