How to use PHP to submit a cURL request with HTTP Post data

Posted in PHP on 28 October 2016

Straight forward script to POST an array of fields to a given URL.

// First, set the URL you want to POST the data to
$url = 'http://domain.com/script/';

// Specify the POST data
$fields = array(
  'field1' => "Value 1",
  'field2' => "Value Two",
  'field3' =>  "Value 3"
);


// Next, erge the array data into a single sting
foreach ($fields as $key => $value) { $fields_string .= $key . '=' . $value . '&'; }
$fields_string = "";
rtrim($fields_string, '&');

// Open a CURL connection
$ch = curl_init();

// Set the CURL options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, count($fields));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $fields_string);

// Fire!
$result = htmlspecialchars_decode(curl_exec($ch));

// Close your connection
curl_close($ch);

And that’s it. The $result variable will contain the response from the request. Depending how this is provided it might be plain text, JSON or pretty much anything else imaginable (over HTTP).

If it is a JSON string it can be converted to an object as follows:

$decode = json_decode($result);

Where $decode is a PHP object.