Can PHP interact with a website?

Question

Is it possible for PHP to log into websites and interact with them?

If so, what technologies do I need to start looking into?

Basically, what I need to do is fill out forms using PHP. I suppose cURL could do this, but I'm not entirely sure.

Too broad and needs more info. Is it always going to be the same forms? If so, you won't need to do any html parsing, just send the requests. To log in you would have to use curl to send login request, grab the returned session id cookie and add this to following requests... — dqhendricks, Jan 12 '12 at 21:43

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 12 '12 at 21:37

3

answered Jan 12 '12 at 21:37

Vladimir

1

Yeah, he knows that, he said so in his question – Cyclone Jan 12 '12 at 21:38
1

Well his question was too broad in the first place, wasn't it? – Vladimir Jan 12 '12 at 21:39
@Cyclone Yes he did say he knows of it. But it doesn't mean that Vladimir's answer is wrong. – Chris Bornhoft Jan 12 '12 at 21:39

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:12

3

Your question is very broad, but basically:

Use cURL to get the HTML of a page.
Parse the HTML and find form elements (see this answer on HTML parsing).
Generate data to submit based on the inputs in the form.
Use cURL to create a request to the submit attribute of the form (making sure to use the specified method).

edited May 23 '17 at 12:12

Community

answered Jan 12 '12 at 21:39

Alex Coplan

2 Answers2