Post data using streams in PHP
I recently stumbled upon this ghost feature of PHP using which you can actually use streams in order to post data using a HTTP POST request.
Basically,
Streams are the way of generalizing file, network, data compression, and other operations which share a common set of functions and uses. In its simplest definition, a stream is a resource object which exhibits streamable behavior. That is, it can be read from or written to in a linear fashion, and may be able to
fseek()to an arbitrary location within the stream.
PHP comes with streams functions out-of-the-box as they are part of PHP core. Here are all the stream functions that comes with PHP.
We’re specifically going to talk about one of these function called stream_context_create which can be used in combination with file_get_contents to send data using HTTP POST method.
file_get_contents with Streams
To actually send a HTTP POST request using file_get_contents, you’ll need to pass in a third parameter (which is a $context) to the file_get_contents function like so.
<?php
$postdata = [
'var1' => 'some content',
'var2' => 'doh'
];
$opts = [
'http' => [
'method' => 'POST',
'header' => 'Content-type: application/json',
'content' => $postdata
]
];
$context = stream_context_create($opts);
$result = file_get_contents('http://example.com/submit.php', false, $context);
So, as you can see in the example, you can create a “stream context” using stream_context_create by passing various HTTP options as an array such as method, header, content etc. And now passing $context to file_get_contents will create a stream through which data can be sent over a HTTP POST request.
The same can be achieved for a FTP and SSL connection as well by replacing http with ftp and ssl in the context option respectively.
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