Question

When my PHP script runs, I would like to run a link like this server side:

http://77.33.xx.xx/s/addtoqueue.php?action=store&filename=myprettypicture&link=http://i69.servimg.com/u/f69/13/29/70/44/facebo10.png

Im doing this for storing the images on a own separate images server. The link is adding the image to a queue.

How can I execute this link correct?

I did this so far:

$link = 'http://77.33.xx.xx/s/addtoqueue.php?action=store&filename='.$filename.'&link=$link;

But dont know how to run this?

And would it by the way be smart to urlencode() and urldecode() the $link?

Answer 1

I wouldn’t build the query string myself like that, but use http_build_query() in preference:

$url = 'http://77.33.xx.xx/s/addtoqueue.php';
$params = array(
    'action' => 'store',
    'filename' => $filename,
    'link' => $link,
);
$link = $url . '?' . http_build_query($params);

To actually make a call to the URL you can use a number of techniques, but my favourite in this case would be curl. Here is an adapted version of the example from the manual:

<?php
$ch = curl_init($link);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

Other options include file_get_contents($link); if the fopen wrappers have been enabled.

Additional response for comments

<?php
$ch = curl_init($link);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

$response now contains the response from the URL. From the curl_exec() manual page:

Returns TRUE on success or FALSE on failure. However, if the
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER option is set, it will return the result on
success, FALSE on failure.

For more information on the curl options you can use checkout the curl_setopt() manual page.