A cfhttp “POST” in php

Question

I have a ColdFusion page that appends the a URL with form variables. I\'m trying replicate this code in php:

Answer 1

In PHP HTTP is intergrated as a so called stream wrapper­Docs. That means you can use it with standard file- and stream-related functions:

$url = 'http://api.test.com/import-lead-data.php';
$result = file_get_contents($url);

This would create a standard GET request. But you want to have a POST request, therefore you need to add some context options­Docs:

$url = 'http://api.test.com/import-lead-data.php';
$options['http'] = array(
    'method' => "POST", 
);    
$context = stream_context_create($options);    
$result = file_get_contents($url, NULL, $context);

This would make the POST request instead of GET. What's still missing are the form fields. Let's say you have all fields in an array of key => value pairs:

$url = 'http://api.test.com/import-lead-data.php';
$content = http_build_query($form_fields);    
$options['http'] = array(
    'method' => "POST", 
    'content' => $content,
);    
$context = stream_context_create($options);    
$result = file_get_contents($url, NULL, $context);

Hope that's helpful. Naturally you can use as well the http_post_data or http_post_fields function as well if you have it available.

See as well: HEAD first with PHP Streams.

Answer 2

The HTTP PECL extension (which contains the HTTPRequest class) isn't part of a default PHP installation.

I would take a look at CURL: http://php.net/manual/en/book.curl.php. You can set the HTTP method and parameters.

Or, if you don't mind using a framework, checkout the Zend FW HTTP Client module: http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.http.html

Here's an example of using CURL to do a post request: http://davidwalsh.name/execute-http-post-php-curl