In PHP, you can use a
file function to read the whole contents of a file into an array, and you've got a whole variety of other functions to open and read files in other ways too. If you want to read from a web page (a URL) via the GET method, that's easy too - simply put the URL in instead of the file name and PHP will work it out for you.
But what if you want to access a page from your server via the POST method? That's a little more complex, but it can be done; I had cause yesterday, and I wrote a sample posting script ... see
full source code.
If you're into this sort of thing, you'll notice I've used the more complex HTTP 1.1 protocol to ensure that my script will work even on virtual hosts sharing a single IP address, and that I've checked for the existance of a robots.txt file. To some extent, the script I've written is an automaton or robot, and so this chsck should be made. It
runs very nicely and it's quite a useful tool for learning how HTTP 1.1 and POST protocols work.
(written 2005-09-26, updated 2006-06-05)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
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[314] What language is this written in? - (2005-05-17)
[345] Spotting a denial of service attack - (2005-06-12)
[356] Sudoku helper or sudoku cheat - (2005-06-23)
[372] Time calculation in PHP - (2005-07-08)
[376] What brings people to my web site? - (2005-07-13)
[410] Reading a news or blog feed (RSS) in your PHP page - (2005-08-12)
[425] Caching an XML feed - (2005-08-26)
[443] Server side scripting of styles to suit the browser - (2005-09-12)
[484] Setting the file name for a downloaded document - (2005-11-03)
[537] Daily Image Santafied - (2005-12-22)
[542] Morning image, afternoon image - (2005-12-26)
[565] Using PHP to output images, XML, Style sheets, etc - (2006-01-15)
[603] PHP - setting sort order with an associative array - (2006-02-13)
[675] Adding PHP tags to an old cgi program - (2006-04-08)
[767] Finding the language preference of a web site visitor - (2006-06-18)
[789] Hot answers in PHP - (2006-07-02)
[847] Image maps for navigation - a straightforward example - (2006-08-28)
[904] Of course I'll tell you by email - (2006-10-25)
[936] Global, Superglobal, Session variables - scope and persistance in PHP - (2006-11-21)
[1009] Passing GET parameters through Apache mod_rewrite - (2006-12-27)
[1114] PHP Image upload script - (2007-03-21)
[1183] Improving searches - from OR to AND? - (2007-05-11)
[1187] Updating a page strictly every minute (PHP, Perl) - (2007-05-14)
[1210] PHP header() function - uses and new restrictions - (2007-05-30)
[1355] .php or .html extension? Morally Static Pages - (2007-09-17)
[1379] Simple page password protection - PHP - (2007-10-04)
[1485] Copyright and theft of images, bandwidth and members. - (2007-12-26)
[1495] Single login and single threaded models - Java and PHP - (2008-01-04)
[1496] PHP / Web 2 logging - (2008-01-06)
[1505] Script to present commonly used images - PHP - (2008-01-13)
[1515] Keeping staff up to date on hotel room status - (2008-01-22)
[1518] Downloading data for use in Excel (from PHP / MySQL) - (2008-01-25)
[1549] http, https and ajp - comparison and choice - (2008-02-22)
[2632] Shipping a test harness with your class in PHP - (2010-02-12)
[2679] How to build a test harness into your PHP - (2010-03-16)
[2729] Uploading a document or image to its own URL via a browser - (2010-04-18)
[2918] Downloading a report from the web for further local analysis - (2010-08-13)
[3036] Sending out an email containing HTML from within a PHP page - (2010-11-07)
[3432] 3 digit HTTP status codes - what are they, which are most common, which should be a concern? - (2011-09-11)
[3540] Easy session example in PHP - keeping each customers data apart - (2011-12-06)
[3568] Telling which ServerAlias your visitor used - useful during merging domains - (2012-01-04)
[3918] Multiple page web applications - maintaining state - PHP - (2012-11-10)
[4070] Passing variable between PHP pages - hidden fields, cookies and sessions - (2013-04-26)
[4483] Moving from mysql to mysqli - simple worked example - (2015-05-03)
Some other Articles
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