Using cURL

Dawn Rossi, 12-05-2008

cURL is a method of easily submitting data with URL syntax (HTTP_POST / HTTP_GET).

cURL offers two big benefits -

1. Ease of use

2. Support for multiple protocols: FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, TFTP, SCP, SFTP, Telnet, DICT, FILE, LDAP and LDAPS

If you're coding in C, you can use cURL by calling the curl command line utility. If you're coding in PHP, use the built-in cURL functions.

Example of posting data to a third party site using cURL in C:

// Populate data into buffer
strcpy(buffer, "name1=value1&name2=value2");

// Pass to Paysystems
sprintf(sPathToCURL, "/usr/local/bin");
sprintf(sCommandLine, "%s/curl -k -m 120 -d \"%s\" https://psc.paysystems.com/psRedirector/psclient -L > %s", sPathToCURL,
buffer, sResponseFilename);
system(sCommandLine);

Example of posting data to a third party site using PHP cURL functions:

// add lead
$ch = curl_init();

// set the url
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.softwareprojects.com/aff/do_addlead");

// set username/password
$input['a'] = $account_id;
$input['p'] = $password;
$input['aff_id'] = $aff_id;

// execute
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $input);
$buf = curl_exec($ch);

// Display result
echo $buf;

// close
curl_close($ch);

-

Important: The command line cURL utility includes a silent option (-s). Never ever use this option. It has unexpected results. Instead of merely suppressing output, running cURL with the silent flag turned on, causes cURL to run in the background & potentially disrupting your application control flow.

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