RAW POST using cURL in PHP

Question

How can I do a RAW POST in PHP using cURL?

Raw post as in without any encoding, and my data is stored in a string. The data should be formatted like this:

... usual HTTP header ...
Content-Length: 1039
Content-Type: text/plain

89c5fdataasdhf kajshfd akjshfksa hfdkjsa falkjshfsa
ajshd fkjsahfd lkjsahflksahfdlkashfhsadkjfsalhfd
ajshdfhsafiahfiuwhflsf this is just data from a string
more data kjahfdhsakjfhsalkjfdhalksfd

One option is to manually write the entire HTTP header being sent, but that seems less optimal.

Anyway, can I just pass options to curl_setopt() that say use POST, use text/plain, and send the raw data from a $variable?

score 281 · Accepted Answer · edited May 30 '22 at 13:07

281

I just found the solution, kind of answering to my own question in case anyone else stumbles upon it.

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,            "http://url/url/url" );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST,           1 );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,     "body goes here" ); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER,     array('Content-Type: text/plain')); 

$result = curl_exec($ch);

edited May 30 '22 at 13:07

danronmoon

3,814
5
34
56

answered May 16 '09 at 01:36

The Unknown

19,224
29
77
93

4

will php set the content-length header for you or should you set that as well? – Eric Bloch Jul 13 '13 at 03:47
3

I cannot get this to work at all. I have a page that I am trying to post raw data to. That page records all raw data it receives into a database table. There are no new rows at all. Do you know if anything has changed here since '09? – James Oct 24 '13 at 13:50
1

This works for me, without specifying any HTTP header. – xryl669 Jan 14 '14 at 10:27
15

I just realized that **body goes here** can include any valid json string. – shasi kanth Jul 31 '15 at 07:40
To post RAW **files** instead of a variable's contents, see this answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15508850/how-to-raw-post-huge-xml-file-with-curl-php/31696809#31696809 This is especially useful for huge files because `file_get_contents()` won't help. – Shadocko Jan 15 '16 at 08:13
2

There is a 2G limit for this raw post. If you attempt to send file larger than 2G they will be truncated back to 2G. Its a limitation of the string type being loaded. – Kaden Yealy Aug 30 '16 at 19:06
what is the type of `$result` as in what do we expect to see when success/failure – Biasi Wiga Nov 29 '19 at 19:56
@BiasiWiga the `$result` is what ever the page is returning. generally you would hope to see a 200 response code at least to know it went through. – Craig B Aug 10 '20 at 06:27
is there a way to just write a raw request in its entirety without curl constructing it for us? – Brad Mar 29 '22 at 06:06
For me this is what worked, in "body goes here" I just included the json_decode($body) output and perfect response. I did that before but with json content-type it wouldn't work at all. – cdsaenz Sep 29 '22 at 13:38

Serhii Andriichuk · Answer 2 · 2019-06-24T18:21:57.387

Implementation with Guzzle library:

use GuzzleHttp\Client;
use GuzzleHttp\RequestOptions;

$httpClient = new Client();

$response = $httpClient->post(
    'https://postman-echo.com/post',
    [
        RequestOptions::BODY => 'POST raw request content',
        RequestOptions::HEADERS => [
            'Content-Type' => 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
        ],
    ]
);

echo(
    $response->getBody()->getContents()
);

PHP CURL extension:

$curlHandler = curl_init();

curl_setopt_array($curlHandler, [
    CURLOPT_URL => 'https://postman-echo.com/post',
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,

    /**
     * Specify POST method
     */
    CURLOPT_POST => true,

    /**
     * Specify request content
     */
    CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => 'POST raw request content',
]);

$response = curl_exec($curlHandler);

curl_close($curlHandler);

echo($response);

Source code

RAW POST using cURL in PHP

2 Answers2

Linked

Related