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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T13:59:35+00:00

I have a page that is making an XML POST-Request to an URL on

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I have a page that is making an XML POST-Request to an URL on a different server (e.g. “http://wwww.externalserver.com/login“). This server is sending plain HTML as response. The problem is, that the URL shown in the browser ist still on my local server, let’s say “http://localhost/callExternal.php“. The external URL is redirecting (302) to another page.

The returned HTML of this target page contains relative image paths. Because of the not matching URL these relative paths are not valid and therefore no images or stylesheets are loaded.

Is there a way to make CURL (or any other solution working in PHP4) changing the location so that these relative paths work (without parsing the HTML and changing the paths)?

This is the calling script “http://localhost/callExternal.php“:

$data = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><Some XML></Some XML>';  

$res = curl_init('http://wwww.externalserver.com/login');

curl_setopt($res, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($res, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($res, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
curl_setopt($res, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($res, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array("Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8"));
curl_exec($res);
curl_close($res);

And this is a snippet of the returned HTML with a link example:

<html>
<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="/css/screen.css" />
</head>
<body>test</body>
</html>

And the URL is still showing “http://localhost/callExternal.php“, so the link to the Stylesheet obviously doesn’t work.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You might want to try inserting the <base> tag inside the <head> section of the HTML ; quoting w3schools :

    The <base> tag specifies a default
    address or a default target for all
    links on a page.

    The <base> tag goes inside the head
    element.

    And, in the HTML 4 specifications :

    In HTML, links and references to
    external images, applets,
    form-processing programs, style
    sheets, etc. are always specified by a
    URI. Relative URIs are resolved
    according to a base URI, which may
    come from a variety of sources. The
    BASE element allows authors to specify
    a document’s base URI explicitly.

    When present, the BASE element must
    appear in the HEAD section of an HTML
    document, before any element that
    refers to an external source. The path
    information specified by the BASE
    element only affects URIs in the
    document where the element appears.

    The example given looks like this :

    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<HTML>
 <HEAD>
   <TITLE>Our Products</TITLE>
   <BASE href="http://www.aviary.com/products/intro.html">
 </HEAD>

 <BODY>
   <P>Have you seen our <A href="../cages/birds.gif">Bird Cages</A>?
 </BODY>
</HTML>

    And the relative URI “../cages/birds.gif” would resolve to:

    http://www.aviary.com/cages/birds.gif
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