cURL question

[williamwdoyle]

I was reading through the cURL tutorial here that described how to connect to the dict.org server in order to query it for a word definition. My question is (after looking through the documentation at dict.org), how do you know what to send as your URL in the CURLOPT_URL setting? I mean that generically. I want to know how I would figure this out for anything I want to connect to, not just dict.org. That was just an example. I would appreciate any help. Thanks

[bpat1434]

Well, go to whatever site you want to connect to. Do what you want to automate through the script. Then, read the URL. Example:

Dict.org
-- visit www.dict.org
-- search for: "PHP"
-- read url: www.dict.org/bin/Dict

Google.com
-- visit www.google.com
-- search for: "PHP"
-- read url: www.google.com/search?q=PHP

Okay, so now you know what the URL ends up as. For dict.org, it uses posts so that "requires" cURL (Zend has a tutorial on not using cURL for Posting items).

Anyway, so we know we need to post information to the url we end up at. Problem solved. We then use cURL to POST the term ("Query"), what to search for ("Strategy"), and what database to look in ("Database"). Once you properly fill those values, you should get the result you want.

I figured out what to post by looking at the source code of the form. You can also get the values from there as well.

~Brett

[williamwdoyle]

thanks bpatt. i guess the reason i was confused was because the example here on phpbuilder was much different. i figured it out though... you can look at it at this url and tell me what you think and or make any suggestions