How can i get the length of a curl Post body - php

Question

I am trying to log in to a remote website which requires me to post username password and login via post. I am using the Curl Option
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS , $postData);
and assign my info like this
$postData['email'] = 'smart#acme.com';
$postData['password'] = 'Secret';
$postData['Submit']='Login';
But the remote server complains about
HTTP Error 411. The request must be chunked or have a content length.
So how can i tell the content length of my postData ?

Answer 1

To get the length of PostData, you can use PHP's function count to get it.
Try:
#Get the length
$postData_len = count($postData);
#Set Curl Header with Content Length
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Length: '.$postData_len));
The above code with calculate the length of the postData array and then set the Curl header, if you're looking for 1 line of code, try this:
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Length: '.count($postData)));

Answer 2

Not sure this will work for you or not? but you need something like this with strlen() to set Content-Length.
$postData= array("email" => "smart#acme.com", "password" => "Secret","Submit"=>"Login");
$data_string = json_encode($postData);
$ch = curl_init('http://api.remote.com');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data_string);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
'Content-Type: application/json',
'Content-Length: ' . strlen($data_string))
);
$result = curl_exec($ch);

Answer 3

$ch = curl_init();
$data['email'] = 'smart#acme.com';
$data['password'] = 'Secret';
$data['Submit']='Login';
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, '****/upload.php');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
curl_exec($ch);
the header of the request is
[CONTENT_LENGTH] => 357
[CONTENT_TYPE] => multipart/form-data; boundary=------------------------aac448045c2fe517
however if we pass the args through string like this
$ch = curl_init();
$data['email'] = 'smart#acme.com';
$data['password'] = 'Secret';
$data['Submit']='Login';
echo strlen(http_build_query($data));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, '*/upload.php');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($data));
curl_exec($ch);
and the header of this request is
[CONTENT_LENGTH] => 51
[CONTENT_TYPE] => application/x-www-form-urlencoded
so it is better to use application/x-www-form-urlencoded than multipart/form-data for it is easy to calculate content-length