How do I send a POST request with PHP?

Question

Actually I want to read the contents that come after the search query, when it is done. The problem is that the URL only accepts POST methods, and it does not t

Answer 1

I use the following function to post data using curl. $data is an array of fields to post (will be correctly encoded using http_build_query). The data is encoded using application/x-www-form-urlencoded.

function httpPost($url, $data)
{
    $curl = curl_init($url);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($data));
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    $response = curl_exec($curl);
    curl_close($curl);
    return $response;
}

@Edward mentions that http_build_query may be omitted since curl will correctly encode array passed to CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS parameter, but be advised that in this case the data will be encoded using multipart/form-data.

I use this function with APIs that expect data to be encoded using application/x-www-form-urlencoded. That's why I use http_build_query().