PHP string from HTTP post to another server - php

Question

I will be using PHP further on this site, otherwise interested in learning more python to achieve these results.
I start with a search form that allows the user to enter in the 'findme' value which needs to be translated to a url. (for example purposes I will use findme = 12345678)
<form name="search" method="post" action="search.php" target="_blank" novalidate>
<input type="text" name="findme" />
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="submit" />
</form>
And then, I would like to retrieve a string within a HTTP post response page from a second server and store a url as a PHP string.
First I need to submit the form to another server, here is my attempt at search.php
<?php
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://another.server.com");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
$data = array(
'surname' => 'surname',
'name' => 'name',
'findme' => 'findme'
);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
$info = curl_getinfo($ch);
curl_close($ch);
?>
The other server responds by serving a new page (ie. https://another.server.com/response.html), I want to then find the line containing the findme string, below is the format which the findme value of 12345678 would appear in a line of the response page. I want to save ABCDE as a string.
<tr class="special"><td>12345678......
Hopefully I can acheive with
<?php
file_put_contents("response.html", file_get_contents("https://another.server.com/response.html"));
$content = file_get_contents('response.html');
preg_match('~^(.*'.$findme.'.'</a>'.*)$~',$content,$line);
echo $line[1];
$findme_url = substr("abcdef", -37, 5);
echo $findme_url
?>
Updated with cURL and preg_match possible solutions, however the file put contents needs to be reading the response page from cURL

Answer 1

Yes, this is a perfect time to use curl.
$request = curl_init( 'https://another.server.com' );
curl_setopt( $request, CURLOPT_POST, true ); // use POST
$response = curl_exec( $request );
// catch errors
if( $response === false ) {
throw new Exception( curl_error($response) );
}
curl_close( $request );
// parse response...