Question

I’m making a request to the google closure compiler API service:

   $content = file_get_contents('file.js');

   $url = 'http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/compile';
   $post = true;
   $postData = array('output_info' => 'compiled_code', 'output_format' => 'text', 'compilation_level' => 'SIMPLE_OPTIMIZATIONS', 'js_code' => urlencode($content)));

    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

    if ($post) {
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, $post);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postData);
    }

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8'));  

But the request is failing and I get this error message from google:

   Error(18): Unknown parameter in Http request: '------------------------------0f1f2f05fb97
   Content-Disposition: form-data; name'.
   Error(13): No output information to produce, yet compilation was requested.

I looked at the headers and this Content-Type header is being sent:

  application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8; boundary=----------------------------0f1f2f05fb97

Not sure if that added boundary is normal? And how do I prevent this as google doesn’t seem to like it?

Thank you,
Wesley

Answer 1

Looks like Google’s API doesn’t support multipart/form-data data. Which seems a bit lame to me…

According to the PHP documentation on curl_setopt():

Passing an array to CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS will encode the data as multipart/form-data,
while passing a URL-encoded string will encode the data as application/x-www-form-urlencoded.

So it should work if you change the 4th line of your code to something like this:

$postData = 'output_info=compiled_code&output_format=text&compilation_level=SIMPLE_OPTIMIZATIONS&js_code=' . urlencode($content);

In other words, you have to do the URL encoding yourself – you apparently can’t rely on cURL to take an array and encode it for you.