Question

Edit: Why the minus one?

What I am trying to do is the following:

• I am trying to login to my school site using cURL and grab the schedule to use it for my AI.

So I need to login using my pass and number, but the form on the school site also needs a hidden ‘token’.

<form action="index.php" method="post">
    <input type="hidden" name="token" value="becb14a25acf2a0e697b50eae3f0f205" />
    <input type="text" name="user" />
    <input type="password" name="password" />
    <input type="submit" value="submit">
</form>

I’m able to successfully retrieve the token. Then I try to login, but it fails.

// Getting the whole website
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.school.com');
$data = curl_exec($ch);

// Retrieving the token and putting it in a POST
$regex = '/<regexThatWorks>/';
preg_match($regex,$data,$match);
$postfields = "user=<number>&password=<secret>&token=$match[1]";

// Should I use a fresh cURL here?

// Setting the POST options, etc.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postfields);

// I won't use CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER yet, first I want to see results. 
$data = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch); 

Well… It doesn’t work…

• Is it possible the token changes every curl_exec? Because the site doesn’t recognize the script the second time…
• Should I create a new cURL instance(?) for the second part?
• Is there another way to grab the token within 1 connection?
• Cookies?

Answer 1

This is how I solved it. The problem was probably the ‘not-using-cookies’ part.
Still this is probably ‘ugly’ code, so any improvements are welcome!

// This part is for retrieving the token from the hidden field.
// To be honest, I have no idea what the cookie lines actually do, but it works.
$getToken= curl_init();
curl_setopt($getToken, CURLOPT_URL, '<schoolsite>');       // Set the link
curl_setopt($getToken, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, 'cookies.txt');  // Magic
curl_setopt($getToken, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, 'cookies.txt'); // Magic
curl_setopt($getToken, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);         // Return only as a string
$data = curl_exec($token);                                 // Perform action

// Close the connection if there are no errors
if(curl_errno($token)){print curl_error($token);}
else{curl_close($token);} 

// Use a regular expression to fetch the token
$regex = '/name="token" value="(.*?)"/';
preg_match($regex,$data,$match);

// Put the login info and the token in a post header string
$postfield = "token=$match[1]&user=<number>&paswoord=<mine>";
echo($postfields);

// This part is for logging in and getting the data.
$site = curl_init();
curl_setopt($site, CURLOPT_URL, '<school site');
curl_setopt($site, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, 'cookies.txt');    // Magic
curl_setopt($site, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, 'cookies.txt');   // Magic
curl_setopt($site, CURLOPT_POST, 1);                     // Use POST (not GET)
curl_setopt($site, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postfield);      // Insert headers
$forevil_uuh_no_GOOD_purposes = curl_exec($site);        // Output the results

// Close connection if no errors           
if(curl_errno($site)){print curl_error($site);}
else{curl_close($site);}