Question

I’ve looked around a bit and can’t find a solution that solves my problem. I’m getting the following error: “The requested URL returned error: 413.”

I’m posting some information via curl and PHP to a URL via HTTPS. I’m told that I have to pass the “Content-Length” along with my request since the destination is https and not http.

Here’s the code I’m using:

    $user = '11111111111111111';
    $books = array(111);

    $data = array("action" => "books-shared", "userID" => $user, "bookIDs" => $books);
    $data_string = array('json'=>json_encode($data));
    $target_url = 'https://www.test.com/test.php'; // fake URL of course

    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data_string);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$target_url);                                                                  
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(                                                                          
        'Content-Type: application/json',                                                                                
        'Content-Length: ' . strlen($data_string))                                       
    );                                                                                                                   

    $api = curl_exec($ch);

My strlen($data_string) command is returning a value of 5, which is much less than the actual length of the $data_string, which is much longer. I assume this is the problem unless someone thinks it might be being caused by something else.

Answer 1

Here’s what I ended up with:

    $user = '11111111111111111';
    $books = array(111);

    $data = array("action" => "books-shared", "userID" => $user, "bookIDs" => $books);
    $data_string = array('json'=>json_encode($data));

    $target_url = 'https://www.test.com/test.php'; // fake URL of course

    $ch = curl_init();
    if (!$ch) {
        die("Couldn't initialize a cURL handle");
    }       
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, true);        
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data_string);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $target_url);                                                                  
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true);                                                                                                                  

    $api = curl_exec($ch);

No SSL or size errors and it seems to work fine.