PHP curl post application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Curl is a powerful and widely-used library for sending HTTP requests from PHP. One common use case is to send POST requests with the Content-Type set as application/x-www-form-urlencoded. This tutorial will guide you through the process of using PHP's curl library to send such requests.

Prerequisites

Before proceeding, make sure you have the following:

• PHP installed on your machine
• Enabled PHP curl extension

The code

Here's an example PHP code snippet that demonstrates how to use curl to send a POST request with application/x-www-form-urlencoded content type:

<?php

$url = 'https://example.com/api/endpoint';
$data = array(
    'param1' => 'value1',
    'param2' => 'value2'
);

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($data));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

echo $response;
?>

Explanation

Let's break down the code snippet step by step:

• We define the $url variable with the endpoint we want to send the POST request to.
• We create an associative array $data containing key-value pairs of the form parameters we want to send.
• We initialize a curl session using curl_init().
• We set the URL for the request using curl_setopt() with CURLOPT_URL option.
• We specify that this is a POST request using curl_setopt() with CURLOPT_POST option set to 1.
• We set the request data using curl_setopt() with CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS option, passing the data array after encoding it with http_build_query() function.
• We instruct curl to return the response instead of outputting it directly using CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER.
• We execute the request using curl_exec(), which sends the request to the server and returns the response.
• Finally, we close the curl connection with curl_close().
• The response is then printed using echo.

Note: In a real-world scenario, you would customize the URL, form data, and handle the response according to your specific requirements.

Conclusion

Using PHP's curl library, you can easily send POST requests with the application/x-www-form-urlencoded content type. Curl provides many more options for customizing the requests, such as setting headers, handling cookies, or handling redirects. Refer to the official PHP curl documentation for more information.

That's it! You can now use this code snippet as a starting point for your own applications that require sending POST requests with application/x-www-form-urlencoded content type.