Simulating form submissions using "POST"

Anon

I've found a lot of help on each step of this, but wasn't able to put something together that works.
Problem:
To simulate a form submission via a "POST" method to a secure server and get the returning file as a string.
Assume the server name is xml.server.com
If using an HTML form, the declaration would be method="POST" action="https://xml.server.com"...
When submitted, some xml is returned into the browser. Since I need to do something with the xml, I changed the "action" to "page.php" page, and need "page.php" to end up with the xml returned by that server in a string. Notes: a) that server knows which method the form was posted using, and only allows POST and b) note in action above the path to post to is root on the server.
I've tried using the fSockOpen followed by the fPuts approach --
echoln("<hr>");
$host = "xml.test.surepay.com";
$Socket = pfSockOpen($host, 443);
if($Socket)
{
$path = "";
fputs($Socket, "POST " . $path . " HTTP/1.1\n");
fputs($Socket, "Host: " . $host . "\n");
fputs($Socket, "Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\n");
$data = "?xml=" . URLEncode($xml);
fputs($Socket, "Content-length: " . StrLen($data) . "\n");
fputs($Socket, $data . "\n");
fputs($Socket, "Connection: close\n\n");
while(!fEOF($Socket))
{
$RetValue = fGetS($Socket,4096);
// flush();
}
}
$str_source = HTMLEntities($RetValue);
echoln($str_source . "<hr>");

Doesn't work. PHP doesn't report any errors, but $RetValue is 1 empty string...
Thanks in advance to anyone who can help...

ziong

is "$RetValue .= fgets($Socket, 4096);"?

mp96brbj

I've seen similar questions being raised, but I've never seen anyone solving the problem of emulating POST submissions. Good luck, though.

Anon

Quite a late reply, but since there was no reply to the subject; I found that in another Surepay PHP code piece that I looked at somewhere, an undocumented (was anyway)feature of curl;
Option CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER must be set to 1. Here is a piece of code from a surepay-interfacing library I created at http://sausurepay.sourceforge.net

$curlsession = curl_init ();
curl_setopt ($curlsession, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt ($curlsession, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt ($curlsession, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postdata);
curl_setopt ($curlsession, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDSIZE, 0);
curl_setopt ($curlsession, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $timeout-seconds);
curl_setopt ($curlsession, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt ($curlsession, CURLOPT_SSLVERSION, 3);
curl_setopt ($curlsession, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec ($curlsession);

That should work (SSL)