Execute a HTTP POST Using PHP CURL ...

A customer recently brought to me a unique challenge. My customer wants information request form data to be collected in a database. Nothing new, right? Well, there's a hurdle — the information isn't going to be saved on the localhost database — it needs to be stored in a remote database that I cannot connect directly to.

A customer recently brought to me a unique challenge. My customer wants information request form data to be collected in a database. Nothing new, right? Well, there is a hurdle — the information isn going to be saved on the localhost database — it needs to be stored in a remote database that I cannot connect directly to.

I thought about all of the possible solutions for solving this challenge and settled on this flow:

   1. User will submit the form, as usual.
   2. In the form processing PHP, I use CURL to execute a POST transmission to a PHP script on the customer is server.
   3. The remote script would do a MySQL INSERT query into the customer is private database.

This solution worked quite well so I thought I would share it with you. Here is how you execute a POST using the PHP CURL library.
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   1. //extract data from the post 
   2. extract($_POST); 
   3.  
   4. //set POST variables 
   5. $url = http://domain.com/get-post.php; 
   6. $fields = array( 
   7.                         lname=>urlencode($last_name), 
   8.                         fname=>urlencode($first_name), 
   9.                         itle=>urlencode($title), 
  10.                         company=>urlencode($institution), 
  11.                         age=>urlencode($age), 
  12.                         email=>urlencode($email), 
  13.                         phone=>urlencode($phone) 
  14.                 ); 
  15.  
  16. //url-ify the data for the POST 
  17. foreach($fields as $key=>$value) { $fields_string .= $key.=.$value.&; } 
  18. rtrim($fields_string,&); 
  19.  
  20. //open connection 
  21. $ch = curl_init(); 
  22.  
  23. //set the url, number of POST vars, POST data 
  24. curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url); 
  25. curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST,count($fields)); 
  26. curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$fields_string); 
  27.  
  28. //execute post 
  29. $result = curl_exec($ch); 
  30.  
  31. //close connection 
  32. curl_close($ch); 

source: davidwalsh

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