Fetch PHP Post data without CURL

[I_Play_Predator]

Hey experts,

So, I've been running up a wall against Google trying to figure this out.

I've been writing test cases to test a plugin being made for wordpress.
All the files are stored on the local machine and I want to fetch the post data from index.php, traverse it and check that everything gets spat out properly.

Google keeps redirecting me to CURL. Is there a way to fetch the data without running CURL on the localhost? I tried looking over file_get_contents, but I'm unsure whether that processes the data.

Thanks

[bradgrafelman]

Welcome to PHPBuilder!

I Play Predator;11000711 wrote:

Is there a way to fetch the data without running CURL on the localhost?

Er... I'm not sure I understand what you're asking. Fetch what data?

I Play Predator;11000711 wrote:

I tried looking over file_get_contents, but I'm unsure whether that processes the data.

What do you mean "processes" the data? And again, what data?

[I_Play_Predator]

Sorry, see if I can't be more clear.

I have an index.php file, I want all that code to run as if it were being served to a client and then I want to fetch the contents.

Does that help?

[Derokorian]

And why don't you want to use cURL? As it seems the best solution for what you are asking.

[bradgrafelman]

You might be able to setup a sort of test harness that allows you to inject inputs and retrieve outputs as if it were a normal user-->web server (HTTP request) and web server-->user (HTTP response) transaction via the use of [man]include[/man]. For example, you could have a script that you would directly execute that does something like:

// enable output buffering since we want to capture/analyze output
// note that if the script under test actually uses output buffering, you might run into issues
ob_start();

// simulate normal Apache headers
$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] = '/var/www/';
$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.142 Safari/535.19';
$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] = '123.45.67.89';

// simulate query string parameters
$_GET['action'] = 'signup';

// simulate POST'ed data
$_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] = 'POST';
$_POST['username'] = 'foobar';
$_POST['password'] = 'barfoo';
$_POST['submit'] = 'submit';

// invoke script to be tested
include 'index.php';

// retrieve generated output
$output = ob_get_clean();

EDIT: Note that if you can leverage your existing webserver and simply perform the tests against it, I would agree with Derkorian - why not simply use [man]cURL[/man] to send an HTTP request to your webserver just like a regular client would?

[I_Play_Predator]

bradgrafelman;11000727 wrote:

You might be able to setup a sort of test harness that allows you to inject inputs and retrieve outputs as if it were a normal user-->web server (HTTP request) and web server-->user (HTTP response) transaction via the use of [man]include[/man]. For example, you could have a script that you would directly execute that does something like:

// enable output buffering since we want to capture/analyze output
// note that if the script under test actually uses output buffering, you might run into issues
ob_start();

// simulate normal Apache headers
$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] = '/var/www/';
$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.142 Safari/535.19';
$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] = '123.45.67.89';

// simulate query string parameters
$_GET['action'] = 'signup';

// simulate POST'ed data
$_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] = 'POST';
$_POST['username'] = 'foobar';
$_POST['password'] = 'barfoo';
$_POST['submit'] = 'submit';

// invoke script to be tested
include 'index.php';

// retrieve generated output
$output = ob_get_clean();

EDIT: Note that if you can leverage your existing webserver and simply perform the tests against it, I would agree with Derkorian - why not simply use [man]cURL[/man] to send an HTTP request to your webserver just like a regular client would?

It sounds like it might be less hassle to just setup a test webserver and use cURL.
I might just do that then.

Thanks