Sending POST data without form

Question

Can i send for example a string or another piece of information to another .php file without it being exposed [thus not by GET but by POST conform to what i know] without using a form?

Answer 1

You could use AJAX to send a POST request if you don't want forms.

Using jquery $.post method it is pretty simple:

$.post('/foo.php', { key1: 'value1', key2: 'value2' }, function(result) {
    alert('successfully posted key1=value1&key2=value2 to foo.php');
});

Answer 2

Send your data with SESSION rather than post.

session_start();
$_SESSION['foo'] = "bar";

On the page where you recieve the request, if you absolutely need POST data (some weird logic), you can do this somwhere at the beginning:

$_POST['foo'] = $_SESSION['foo'];

The post data will be valid just the same as if it was sent with POST.

Then destroy the session (or just unset the fields if you need the session for other purposes).

It is important to destroy a session or unset the fields, because unlike POST, SESSION will remain valid until you explicitely destroy it or until the end of browser session. If you don't do it, you can observe some strange results. For example: you use sesson for filtering some data. The user switches the filter on and gets filtered data. After a while, he returns to the page and expects the filter to be reset, but it's not: he still sees filtered data.

Answer 3

Simply use: file_get_contents()

// building array of variables
$content = http_build_query(array(
            'username' => 'value',
            'password' => 'value'
            ));
// creating the context change POST to GET if that is relevant 
$context = stream_context_create(array(
            'http' => array(
                'method' => 'POST',
                'content' => $content, )));

$result = file_get_contents('http://www.example.com/page.php', null, $context);
//dumping the reuslt
var_dump($result);

Reference: my answer to a similar question:

Answer 4

have a look at the php documentation for theese functions you can send post reqeust using them.

fsockopen()
fputs()

or simply use a class like Zend_Http_Client which is also based on socket-conenctions.

also found a neat example using google...

Answer 5

function redir(data) {
  document.getElementById('redirect').innerHTML = '<form style="display:none;" position="absolute" method="post" action="location.php"><input id="redirbtn" type="submit" name="value" value=' + data + '></form>';
  document.getElementById('redirbtn').click();
}

<button onclick="redir('dataToBeSent');">Next Page</button>
<div id="redirect"></div>

You can use this method which creates a new hidden form whose "data" is sent by "post" to "location.php" when a button[Next Page] is clicked.

Answer 6

I would highly recommend using curl in such situation, file_fet_content() does work but not at all times, and it could be troublesome to use it in some applications.

Though curl comes in different variations depending on what you want to send and in what method, here is the most common method of posting your data without HTML form using curl.

    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://example.com/request_uri');
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
    $post = array(
        'data1' => 'value1',
        'data2' => $value2
    );
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post);

    $result = curl_exec($ch);
    if (curl_errno($ch)) {
        echo 'Error:' . curl_error($ch);
    }
    curl_close($ch);
    
    //do what you want with the responce
    var_dump($result)