PHP:5.2 HTTP Request

In this file, we are going to see the how-to-make (not how to handle) HTTP request for an API software.

I have already created some functions to make this easy and doable: you can download the file with the functions here: FILE.*

In order to make a request, we need to “build” the request object.
This object is created using thecurl_init() function, and then we change some options of the object to make it work.

GET

<? php
$url="http://mywebsite.com/get_respond.php?id=1&verify=true"
$ch=curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
//Make sure that the curl_exec returns the content rather that echoing it
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true); 
$result = curl_exec($ch);
?>

So, the first thing is to get the URL you want with its parameters, then create the curl object using curl_init().
Once this is done, we can make some change to the object using curl_setopt() (set options). This function takes 3+ parameter, the first one is, of course, the object itself, the second one is not a string but what I imagine is a CONSTANT, that define which option we are changing, and the third parameter is how we want to change the option.

At the end curl_exec($ch) make the GET call

Here’s a function I have created to simplify all this process:

function http_get($url=null,$parameters=null){
    if(empty($url)){
        return false;
    }
    //var_dump($parameters);
    $ch=curl_init();
    if(!empty($parameters)){
        $url.="?";
        foreach ($parameters as $index=>$param){
            $url.=$index."=".urlencode($param)."&";
        }
    }
    //echo "URL: ".$url."<br>";
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
    //This will make sure that the curl_exec returns the content of the curl rather than echoing it.
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
    $result = curl_exec($ch);
    return curl_close($ch);
}

POST

POST is not that different, we do the same things but with some different configuration for the curl object:

function http_post($url=null,$parameters=null){
    if(empty($url)){
        return false;
    }
    $ch =curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST,true);
    if(!empty($parameters)){
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($parameters));
    }
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
    return curl_exec($ch);
}

What is important here is curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST,true) that tell the object that it is a POST call, and also

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($parameters));

This will add the body, the payload of our POST call, with all the information we want to pass.
It is very important to use http_build_query in order to make sure that node.js will find all the parameters