HTTP POST in PHP

[chs]

I am trying to do a HTTP POST within php code but instead of getting the HTML source of the page I am posting to I just get the HTTP header back e.g.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Sun, 19 Feb 2006 15:32:33 GMT
Server: Apache Coyote/1.0
Connection: close

Here's my code:

PHP Code:

$content = "";
$post_query = "name=".$_POST['name'];
$post_query = urlencode($post_query) . "\r\n";
$host = "test.domain.co.uk";
$path = "/details";
$fp = fsockopen($host, "80");
if ($fp) 
{
    fputs($fp, "POST ".$path." HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: ".$host."\r\n");
    fputs($fp, "Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n");
    fputs($fp, "Content-length: ". strlen($post_query) ."\r\n\r\n");
    fputs($fp, $post_query);

    while (!feof($fp)) 
    {
        $content .= fgets($fp, 4096);
    }
} 

print_output($content); 


What I'd like is $content to contain the HTML source of the page. Does anyone know how this can be done?

Cheers,

Dan

[dmorison]

Just a long-shot; but as the Host header isn't officially part of HTTP 1.0 (it came in at 1.1) try changing your request to send "HTTP/1.1".

If it does make a difference and you are able to get the full response; any strange characters would indicate a chunked encoded response...

[Aquanuke]

Is fsockopen allowed on your server?

I think SELinux comes as default these days which disables sockets.

[chs]

Thanks for the replies guys, fsockopen is enabled.

I tried changing to HTTP 1.1 and although it still didn't work the header changed to:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2006 08:31:09 GMT
Server: Apache Coyote/1.0

Note the addition of Transfer-Encoding: chunked. What exactly does this mean?

[dmorison]

Chuncked encoding is a mechanism in HTTP/1.1 that enables large documents to be transferred in "chunks" and for the transfer to be resumed if the connection drops. This is how Internet Explorer (and other browsers) are able to pick-up on a large download.

As I understand it; chunked encoding is a mandatory requirement of a HTTP/1.1 compatible client; and therefore you cannot indicate that you will not accept it as part of the request. However, it is not part of HTTP/1.0; and therefore if you send a 1.0 request you will not get a chunked encoded response. Luckily; the "Host" header is widely implement with disregards to the HTTP version; so you should be OK.

That doesn't explain why you're not getting the whole document though. Are you doubly sure that that you are POST'ing the correct parameters and action URL in order to get a response....?

[Rich]

I'm not sure why you are getting no document body, but normally the headers and document contents come in in the same stream so the most likely reason is the webserver isn't sending any contents. This could be down to your POST request being invalid or the server is set up to serve different content to different browsers (faily common on aspx pages) and it can't decide what browser you are.

I can't help with the first bit, but to make your request look a bit more like its coming from a regular browser you could try adding the following headers into your request

PHP Code:

fputs($fp, "Accept: */*\r\n");
fputs($fp, "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1\r\n"); 


I just noticed one other thing. I think you need to send a blank line to indicate you have finished sending request headers, that would possibly account for what you are getting back. Just send another \r\n after the post_query.

Hope that helps.