can PHP call / execute a URL?

[sosuke]

I am having the toughest time trying to figure out how to add multiple products to my shopping cart at once.

I figure if I can access or load the URL with the query string several times I can load the items I want.

loadurl('http://someurl.com/Cart?smode=add&product_no=16&qty=1');
loadurl('http://someurl.com/Cart?smode=add&product_no=12&qty=1');
loadurl('http://someurl.com/Cart?smode=add&product_no=13&qty=1');

I have done this in Actionscript of all things but I can't figure out how to actually get this data to load with PHP.

Not to mention the need to know when all the pages have been loaded o.O

<?php
$handle = fopen("http://someurl.com/Cart?smode=add&product_no=16&qty=1", "rb");
$contents = '';
while (!feof($handle)) {
  $contents .= fread($handle, 8192);
}
fclose($handle);
?>

Yeah that code didn't work, any ideas on how I can get this to work?

[Ernie_]

You could use an array. The link would then for example look like this: http://mydomain.com/myscript.php?value[]=a&value[]=b&value[]=c
$GET['value'] will then be an array with 3 elements ($GET['value'][0], $GET['value'][1] and $GET['value'][2]).

[Installer]

Using sessions would probably be the best way. You could also serialize an array for a url request. Or you could use curl, something like this:

$cart = array(array('smode' => 'add', 'product_no' => '16', 'qty' => 1),
              array('smode' => 'add', 'product_no' => '12', 'qty' => 1),
              array('smode' => 'add', 'product_no' => '13', 'qty' => 1));

$customer = 'Tom';
$post_fields = 'customer=' . $customer . '&cart=' . serialize($cart);

$ch = curl_init('http://example.com/cart_update.php');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post_fields);
curl_exec($ch);

cart_update.php:

$customer = $_POST['customer'];
$cart = unserialize($_POST['cart']);

echo $customer . ' ordered:<br />';
foreach ($cart as $item) {
    if ($item['smode'] == 'add') {
        echo $item['qty'] . ' of product #' . $item['product_no'] . '<br />';
    }
}