php tutorial

Download file or web page using PHP cURL

I am discussion how to use cURL function of php to download  a web page and save it .

A typical PHP cURL usage follows the following sequence of steps.

curl_init – Initializes the session and returns a cURL handle which can be passed to other cURL functions.

curl_opt – This is the main work horse of cURL library. This function is called multiple times and specifies what we want the cURL library to do.

curl_exec – Executes a cURL session.

curl_close – Closes the current cURL session.

Below are some examples which should make the working of cURL more clearer.

The below PHP code uses cURL to download Google’s RSS feed.

<?php
/**
* Initialize the cURL session
*/
$ch = curl_init();
/**
* Set the URL of the page or file to download.
*/
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,
'http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&topic=t&output=rss');
/**
* Create a new file
*/
$fp = fopen('rss.xml', 'w');
/**
* Ask cURL to write the contents to a file
*/
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);
/**
* Execute the cURL session
*/
curl_exec ($ch);
/**
* Close cURL session and file
*/
curl_close ($ch);
fclose($fp);
?>

SO enjoy php cURL function to save remote file.

thanks

To submit forms using cURL, we need to follow the below steps:

Prepare the data to be posted
Connect to the remote URL
Post (submit) the data
Fetch response and display it to the user

Prepare data to be posted

<?php
$data = array();
$data['first_name'] = 'Jatinder';
$data['last_name'] = 'Thind';
$data['password'] = 'secret';
$data['email'] = 'mrrrr@playfreegamesonly.com';
?>

So now we need to make the post data encodeing we will use php encoding to do so.Below function will do the same.

<?php
$post_str = '';
foreach($data as $key=>$val) {
	$post_str .= $key.'='.urlencode($val).'&';
}
$post_str = substr($post_str, 0, -1);
?>

Connect to the remote URL
Below is the function to connect to the remote server using curl


<?php
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://example.com/form-handler.php' );
?>
Post (submit) the form data

First we instruct cURL to a regular HTTP POST.

<?php
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, TRUE);
?>
Next we tell cURL which data to send in the HTTP POST.

<?php
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post_str);
?>

Execute request and fetch the response


<?php
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $result;
?>

So using above function we can submit form to remote server or site using curl
thanks