Contrasting GET and POST

Obviously the cURL extension has other functions, but by and large most HTTP requests made using the cURL extension will follow the sequence of operations shown in the above example. Let’s compare this with a POST request.

<?php
$data = array(
'parami' => 'valuel',
'param2' => 'value2',
'filel' => '@/path/to/file', 'file2' => '@/path/to/other/file'
);

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://localhost.example/process'); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$response = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch);
?>

Here are the differences between this example and the previous one.

• The URL is passed using the cu rl_setopt function this time, just to show how to do it without passing it to the curl_init function. This is important when reusing cURL session handles with different URLs.
• CURLOPT_POST is set to t rue to change the request method to POST.
• CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS is an associative array or preformatted query string to be used as the data for the request body. Files can be uploaded by specifying a value where the first character is @ and the remainder of the value is a filesystem path to the file intended for upload.

Here are a few other cURL configuration setting constants related to the request method.

• CURLOPT_HTTPGET: Boolean that, when set to true, explicitly resets the request method to GET if it’s been changed from the default.
• CURLOPT_NOBODY: Boolean that, when set to true, excludes the body from the response by changing the request method to HEAD.