Question

I am in a situation where I cannot use PHP cURL module to POST my form data. I have found a great blog post showing how to POST without using cURL here:
HTTP POST from PHP, without cURL

Here’s my problem though. When I attempt to send my POST request, the request hits the (other) server but the content (POST data) is not transmitted. The other server does not get the content. HOWEVER, if I do use cURL, it works fine. What am I missing? How can I recreate the cURL HTTP POST request without using cURL?

Here is the cURL code that works ($this->params is just $_POST which contains the form data):

$ch = curl_init($this->url);

$params = http_build_query($this->params);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $params );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION  ,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER      ,0);  // DO NOT RETURN HTTP HEADERS
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER  ,1);  // RETURN THE CONTENTS OF THE CALL

$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

return $result;

And here is my non-cURL version that does not work:

$postStr = http_build_query($this->params);

$opts = array(
    'http'=>array(
        'method' => $method,
        //'header' => 'Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
        //'header' => 'content-type: multipart/form-data',
        'content-type' => 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
        'content-encoding' => 'UTF-8',
        'content' => $postStr
    )
);

$context = stream_context_create($opts);

$result = file_get_contents($this->url, false, $context);

return $result;

There are no errors or warnings. Just, the accepting server doesn’t appear to the contents. Any ideas?

Answer 1

It is likely your $method is not populated with 'POST'. The other major reason would have been an open_basedir restriction, but that would have generated a warning.

Try explicitly naming “POST”

$opts = array(
    'http'=>array(
        'method' => 'POST',
        'content-type' => 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
        'content-encoding' => 'UTF-8',
        'content' => $postStr
    )
);