Post to another page within a PHP script

Question

How can I make a post request to a different php page within a php script? I have one front end computer as the html page server, but when the user clicks a button, I want a backend server to do the processing and then send the information back to the front end server to show the user. I was saying that I can have a php page on the back end computer and it will send the information back to the front end. So once again, how can I do a POST request to another php page, from a php page?

Answer 1

Possibly the easiest way to make PHP perform a POST request is to use cURL, either as an extension or simply shelling out to another process. Here's a post sample:

// where are we posting to?
$url = 'http://foo.com/script.php';

// what post fields?
$fields = array(
   'field1' => $field1,
   'field2' => $field2,
);

// build the urlencoded data
$postvars = http_build_query($fields);

// open connection
$ch = curl_init();

// set the url, number of POST vars, POST data
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, count($fields));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postvars);

// execute post
$result = curl_exec($ch);

// close connection
curl_close($ch);

Also check out Zend_Http set of classes in the Zend framework, which provides a pretty capable HTTP client written directly in PHP (no extensions required).

2014 EDIT - well, it's been a while since I wrote that. These days it's worth checking Guzzle which again can work with or without the curl extension.