cURL question

fubowl

I am trying to submit a form to get specific results. The problem is that the server I'm trying to get it from using a session cookie to log the result and then destroys it. I've been trying to get a result using cURL but am unsure of how to go about it. I have the search form but cannot follow it using cURL. However, I am more interested in getting the results.

Can you set cURL to follow a submitted form?

If not, how can you go about showing results in such a circumstance.

I know you can go about pre-filling CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS but I have not had success in doing so, or is there an easier way?

I would really appreciate a working example, everything I've tried to this point has failed.

kireol

the following code works perfectly with a POST. set the $url and $postfields variables and the restult webpage will be in $result

$cookie_file_path = "cookies/cookiejar.txt"; // Please set your Cookie File path
$fp = fopen("$cookie_file_path","w") or die("<BR><B>Unable to open cookie file $mycookiefile for write!<BR>");
fclose($fp); 
	$agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax)";
	$ch = curl_init(); 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$postfields);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $agent);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); 
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookie_file_path);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie_file_path);
	$result = curl_exec ($ch);
	curl_close ($ch);

fubowl

Thank you, that works well. Unfortunately the search form I'm trying to manipulate uses cookies and user identification so the form isn't submitted properly. To explain; once you submit the form, you are redirected to the main page where the cookies id is appended to the URL automatically, which leads me to this quesion.

Could I somehow pass the cookie ID to a variable from the url which is only appended after the form is submitted? Hopefully that makes sense.

But to overview;
User fills out form at index.asp?type=search
Form is submitted, of which <form action="index.asp?">
Page is automatically redirected to index.asp?cookie_id=d324t-t43wt43-gdghre-h54h4h (this is not set by any obvious method)
Results are shown on this page.

I'm still hoping to use the code from kireol, but I have to deal with this cookie issue. So somehow I have to get that cookie_id variable. Any help is appreciated.