Simulating form submit with PHP

Anon

Hi - I'm working on a class of objects (which ultimately will be shared with everyone) to let PHP manage forms on a regular web site... i.e. get a page, "fill out" the form on the page and click the submit button, get the results, etc.

I can get a page, parse the HTML to figure out the form action URL, form fields and submit button, but I can't figure out how to "fill in the fields" before redirecting to the form action URL.

I think I have to put some data into the HTTP request before I get the new page, but how do I do that?

Any help much appreciated.

best,
Eric Mueller

Anon

There is a module in the shared code library that will handle this, but the operation is fairly simple.

For a GET, the values are expressed in the URL as name=value pairs, separated by ampersands, with the values encoded to avoid problems with special characters. For a POST, the

Right off the bat I can't find a good Web reference for POST, but my recollection is that it works the same way (urlencoded name=value). However, the request URL does not include the data. Instead, the request header includes a "Content-Length:" field, and the header is followed (after a blank line) by the data as a message body. To do this, you're going to have to do some socket-level programming, or use the class library, http://px.sklar.com/code.html?code_id=313

Anon

Hey Steve, thanks for the response-- I found the library you referred to (GATE? or GALE? of course I've forgotten the name now)-- it looks good but may be overkill for what I need to do. The class library you pointed me to (http_post.php3) is exactly what I need.

best,
Eric Mueller

Anon

And now, the vagrancies of HTTP Post... I have a piece of code that posts data to a form... when I test with my own form, it works great... but, when I test with another form (LA Public Library search form) I get back an error 302 "page has moved temporarily" with a link to the (valid) results page. what's up with that?? why would the server give me 302 instead of the result page? the POST I'm feeding it looks like:

POST /cgi-bin/cw_cgi?doSearch+15607 HTTP/1.0
Referer:
User-Agent: php-HTTP_POST/1.0
Host: catalog.lapl.org
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-length: 73

Search=Search&terms=jamie%20jensen%20road%20trip%20usa&searchtype=Keyword

and the result from their server:

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2000 04:01:51 GMT Server: Apache/1.2.6 Pragma: no-cache Location: http://catalog.lapl.org:80/cgi-bin/cw_cgi?resultsScreen+15607+1+1+12 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html
Moved Temporarily
The document has moved here.

['here' is a hypertest link to that Location: above.]

-E

Anon

F G H J

Anon

I want to make a new Test