[RESOLVED] using php to fill in a form + get results

irishgirl2004

Hi,
Is it possible to use php to fill in data on another site, and get the results back from the site? i presume if so, i will need to parse html?

the remote site I want to use is a .do ( java ) site.

any help very much appriciated as doing a site to compare prices between different retailers!!!

cheers

bradgrafelman

You'll want to look into using the [man]cURL[/man] extension.

irishgirl2004

cool, is this the only way using php?

bradgrafelman

Well, you could use [man]fsockopen/man to open a connect to the remote server on port 80, send the proper HTTP commands to simulate the form submission, read in the server response, parse the server response to get the HTML content, parse the HTML content to get what you need.

irishgirl2004

hi, curl is on my server 🙂, but seem to have a problem posting to a .do file, here is the code i am using


<?php

// create a new curl resource
$ch = curl_init();

// set URL and other appropriate options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://services.hibernian.ie/direct/HibernianDirectWeb/houseEnterDetailsAction.do?method=initiateSave");
// curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$data = array('confirm_assumptions' => 'Checked');

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
// grab URL, and return output
$output = curl_exec($ch);

// close curl resource, and free up system resources
curl_close($ch);

echo $output;
?>

[code=php]


it does not seem to be getting the post, the first page for the input is

http://www.hibernian.ie/direct/HibernianDirectWeb/house_home.jsp



any ideas?


thanks

bradgrafelman

Do you get in errors? Is error reporting even turned on and set to E_ALL ? Is 'https' listed under the registered streams in phpinfo() ?

irishgirl2004

hi, https is listed in the streams + errors are turned on....

the output i get is the same as if the user does not select the checkbox.....

seems strange?

bradgrafelman

Well that's odd... though I doubt it's case-sensitive, you might try changing the value to 'checked' instead of 'Checked'.

I'm afraid you've stumped me, though.

irishgirl2004

i sorted this, i got the html of the page + saved it to my server. i then used the form action to go to my script called show.php

<?
session_start();
header("Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT");

// always modified
header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " GMT");

// HTTP/1.1
header("Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate");
header("Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0", false);

// HTTP/1.0
header("Pragma: no-cache");


while (list($name,$value) = each($HTTP_POST_VARS))
{
	$$name = $value;
	echo $name;
	echo "    ";
	echo $value;

}


?>
[code=php]

this showed that the checkbox variable was = on!!!!!

simple + silly mistake!!!!

bradgrafelman

When posting PHP code, please use the board's [PHP][/PHP] bbcode tags - they make the code much, much easier to read (as well as aiding the diagnosis of syntax errors). You should edit your post now and add these bbcode tags to help others in reading/analyzing your code. (EDIT: I see you tried to add the tags, but simply forgot a '/' on the ending tag).
Using $HTTP*VARS variables is deprecated; use the new global arrays such as $_POST, explained on this page: [man]variables.predefined[/man].
Your while() loop is simply extracting variable names from the array. This could be done using one simple function: [man]extract/man.

3a. Extracting all variables from the POST array is re-creating the behavior of register_globals. The reason register_globals is highly deprecated (and not even available in PHP6, IIRC) is because of the security risks involved. As such, you shouldn't use anything like this in your code. Or, if you do, use a function like [man]extract/man so you can rewrite the variables with a certain string prepended to them (e.g. $NAME instead becomes $p_NAME).

Don't forget to mark this thread resolved (if it is).