clicking on submit button using php

Question

I have a webpage with a submit button and I would like php to parse the webpage and click the submit button and get the response (it can be a link or another html page.)

Is there any way to click a submit button using php?

I know there is something like htmlunit for java that allows one to pro-grammatically fill the form fields and click submit button. But I would like to do the same in php.

Thanks

Answer 1

CURL will let you get the results of a form submission

eg

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $urlOfFormSubmission);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, array(

        "field1"=>"data1",
        "field2"=>"data2"

    ));

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

$contents = curl_exec($ch);

You can also do the same thing with the PHP Stream functions

eg

$params = array('http' => array(
          'method' => "post",
          'content' => array("field1"=>"data1", "field2"=>"data2")
       ));

$ctx = stream_context_create($params);

$fp = @fopen($urlOfFormSubmission, 'rb', false, $ctx);

if (!$fp)
{
    throw new Error("Problem with ".$urlOfFormSubmission);
}

$contents = @stream_get_contents($fp);

if ($contents === false)
{
    throw new Error("Problem reading data from ".$urlOfFormSubmission);
}

In either case, $contents should contain the results of the form submission