server side http post with PHP

basically I have a page sitting on another website that is used to collect information from a form submission and store it to the associated database.

the html (client side equivalent of what im looking for) would be:

<form action="submissionsite.com/collect.cfm" method=post>
     <input type=text name=email value="someone@somewhere.com">
     <input type=text name=site value="http://yahoo.com">
     <input type=text name=ip value="USERS.IP.ADDRESS">
</form>

Im looking to do the same type of POST submission except on the server side (ie have the PHP server transmit the data in the background).

Hope this clarifies things.

Thanks,
Rick

the way i have always done this is with fsockopen and just sent the http request manually.  If you want to write the entire query yourself, it is not terribly difficult, but one of the easiest ways is to use firefox's plugin Live HTTP Headers and submit the form as normal and look at the headers it sends.  this is a very fast way to learn http headers (as is how i verified mine)

The generic http request (which you would fwrite() to the resource returned from the fsockopen() request to the other server (connect on port 80 usually for web servers)) would look like the following: (note every line ends with \r\n)
POST /path/to/script_name.php HTTP/1.1\r\n
Content-Type: text/form-data\r\n
Content-Length: 10\r\n
\r\n
foo=bar200

the extra line of \r\n marks the end of the headers and beginning of the content.  i hope this helps

the function roonan presented (sorry stale page) should take care of everything you need.  remember that all the variables you need are held in the $_POST array initially and can be made into a query with a foreach loop

Not as a answer just my opinion...

I would use CURL it gives you much better control of the complete process from handling the request to dealing with COOKIES and REDIRECTS which is something you can do partly using any of the functions controled by * allow_url_fopen * but it much more work and has no built error control for the complete process like CURL does!

ms!

Ok so would this be about right as an example? Disregard the #regdata.mpdomain# this is a coldfusion token.

<?php
         $host="http://#regdata.mpdomain#/lb.cfm?lb_id=1";
         $query="email=<useremailaddress&site=<http://www.yoursite.com>&ip=<user ip address>";
         $others="";
         $return_val = post($host,$query,$others);
      function post($host,$query,$others=''){
         $path=explode('/',$host);
         $host=$path[0];
         unset($path[0]);
         $path='/'.(implode('/',$path));
         $post="POST $path HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: $host\r\nContent-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n${others}User-Agent: Mozilla 4.0\r\nContent-length: ".strlen($query)."\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n$query";
         $h=fsockopen($host,80);
         fwrite($h,$post);
         for($a=0,$r='';!$a;){
             $b=fread($h,8192);
             $r.=$b;
             $a=(($b=='')?1:0);
         }
         fclose($h);
         return $r;
      }
      ?>