cURL is software which you can use to make various requests using different protocols. PHP has the option to use cURL and in this article, we’ll show several examples.
curl_init(); // initializes a cURL session curl_setopt(); // changes the cURL session behavior with options curl_exec(); // executes the started cURL session curl_close(); // closes the cURL session and deletes the variable made by curl_init();
A POST request is usually made to send user collected data to a server.
<?php $postRequest = array( 'firstFieldData' => 'foo', 'secondFieldData' => 'bar' ); $cURLConnection = curl_init('http://hostname.tld/api'); curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postRequest); curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); $apiResponse = curl_exec($cURLConnection); curl_close($cURLConnection); // $apiResponse - available data from the API request $jsonArrayResponse - json_decode($apiResponse);
A GET request retrieves data from a server. This can be a website’s HTML, an API response or other resources.
<?php $cURLConnection = curl_init(); curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://hostname.tld/phone-list'); curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); $phoneList = curl_exec($cURLConnection); curl_close($cURLConnection); $jsonArrayResponse - json_decode($phoneList);
You can also set custom headers in your cURL requests. For this, we’ll use the curl_setopt() function.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array( 'Header-Key: Header-Value', 'Header-Key-2: Header-Value-2' ));
Check other PHP related commands and common how to`s. Get a new shared hosting account with up to 40% discount and master your PHP skills.