Passing $_POST values with cURL

Question

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

Answer 1

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 = 'foobar';
$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 CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER or CURLOPT_HEADER.