CURL not posting data to URL - php

Question

I have a simple form which i want to convert into a PHP backend system.
Now this form has an action to submit to a URL - the URL only accepts an invite only when a data with the name postdata and correct information is submitted (xml which has been encoded).
Works: - Note that the input name is called postdata and the value contains the xml which has been urlencoded and it works perfectly.
<form name="nonjava" method="post" action="https://url.com">
<input name="postdata" id="nonjavapostdata" type="hidden" value="&lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot; encoding=&quot;utf-8&quot;" />
<button type="submit" name="submit">Button</button>
</form>
However, i want to achieve the following by moving the postdata element within PHP as a lot of information is passed through that way.
Please note: the link is https but it wasnt working on local so i had to disable it within the CURL.
<?php
$url = 'https://super.com';
$xmlData = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<postdata
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<api>2</api>
</postdata>';
$testing = urlencode($xmlData);
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "postdata=" . $testing);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded'));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 10);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, true);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
// Then, after your curl_exec call:
$header_size = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HEADER_SIZE);
$header = substr($response, 0, $header_size);
$body = substr($response, $header_size);
echo $header_size . '<br>';
echo htmlspecialchars($header) . '<br>';
echo htmlspecialchars($body) . '<br><br>';
$http_status = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
echo "$http_status for $url <br>";
?>
I keep getting a 302 error (which is the url content is not finding the data so its redirecting to a not found page.)

Answer 1

302 is NOT error; it just means you need to go to the redirected URL. A browser does that automatically for you. In PHP code, you would have to do it yourself. Look at the Location header on 302.
I tried to look if there is a way that Curl could be told to follow through redirects; many language HTTP libraries support that. This thread seems to suggest that CuRL also supports it - Is there a way to follow redirects with command line cURL

Answer 2

Your code works as it is supposed to, I am getting POST data:
Array ( [postdata] => <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <postdata xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/20
01/XMLSchema"> <api>2</api> </postdata> )
as a result. The problem is on the receiving side, it isnt handling it correctly.

Answer 3

You need to follow the 302 redirect in curl. This is relatively easy to do by adding the location flag. curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
This is the equivalent of doing curl -L at the CLI. You can see an example here in the php documentation.