General outline for POST method

[gbol]

Hello all,

I am a systems guy for a small mom and pop company and they have asked me to look into developing a site that will pull in price quotes from other sites and display them in a list. I have a little knowledge of php (which I am sure will grow extensively over the next few months) but I am needing help getting out of square one. My inquiry is to the general theory behind the post method. I have found a lot of information regarding syntax but nothing that just gives you a basic outline of how everything should flow together in regards to creating the form, posting the data to a remote server, and then parsing and displaying the xml response. I am sorry for being such an extreme newb, but i thought you guys could point me in the direction I need to take.

Thanks in advance.

[bradgrafelman]

Welcome to PHPBuilder!

The HTTP transaction itself can be explained in as little or as much detail as you'd like, but even a broad high-level understanding of how HTTP works is enough to get you started with the PHP code.

What really matters will be things like:

1. How do you plan on making this transaction? [man]cURL[/man], [man]file_get_contents/man, etc.

2. What type of data are you supposed to be sending?

Using [man]cURL[/man] is probably the most common option. See the [man]curl_setopt/man page for its many options you can set. Some options of interest to you might be: CURLOPT_POST, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER. Also take a look at Example #2 for a barebones coding example.