php post curl method code example

Example 1: curl php example

function makeAPICall($url){

        
        $handle = curl_init();

         
        // Set the url
        curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
        // Set the result output to be a string.
        curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
         
        $output = curl_exec($handle);
         
        curl_close($handle);
         
        echo $output;
    return $output;
    }

Example 2: php use curl

It is important to notice that when using curl to post form data and you use an array for CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS option, the post will be in multipart format

<?php
$params=['name'=>'John', 'surname'=>'Doe', 'age'=>36)
$defaults = array(
CURLOPT_URL => 'http://myremoteservice/', 
CURLOPT_POST => true,
CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => $params,
);
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($ch, ($options + $defaults));
?>
This produce the following post header:

--------------------------fd1c4191862e3566
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="name"

Jhon
--------------------------fd1c4191862e3566
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="surnname"

Doe
--------------------------fd1c4191862e3566
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="age"

36
--------------------------fd1c4191862e3566--

Setting CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS as follow produce a standard post header

CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => http_build_query($params),

Which is:
name=John&surname=Doe&age=36

This caused me 2 days of debug while interacting with a java service which was sensible to this difference, while the equivalent one in php got both format without problem.