using curl to reply to multipart forms

the closest thing to help i've found encountering this issue is:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1154563&highlight=multipart+form

i'm kinda new to php but i've been able to do a good amount of curl regarding httpS sites. now i'm trying to post to a rather large form that incorporates multiparts.

in the thread above he mentions that switching the variable $postdata to an array.. i'm not exactly sure how this would look. i thought it was just name => value , but when you add 'Content-Disposition's in the mix I'm kinda at a lost where or how i would make it look.

And do you basically just recreate EXACTLY how it looks in say Live HTTP Headers (the prog I use to capture headers)..
ex:
"Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"title\"\r\n\r\n";
"Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"bodytext\"\r\n\r\n";
"Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"title\"\r\n\r\n";
... and so on..

Here is the code I'm referring to from the previous thread:

$srand = substr(md5(rand(0,32000)),0,10);
$aform =      "----$srand\r\n";

$submitdata = $aform;
$submitdata .= "Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"title\"\r\n\r\n";
$submitdata .= "$title";
$submitdata .= "\r\n".$aform;
$submitdata .= "Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"bodytext\"\r\n\r\n";
$submitdata .= "$body";
$submitdata .= "\r\n"."----$srand"."--\r\n";

$postdata = $submitdata;
$posturl = "http://test.com/submit.php";
 $ch = curl_init($posturl);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=--$srand");
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST      ,1);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS    ,$postdata);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $timeout);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION  ,0);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIE,  $mycookies);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER      ,1);  // DO NOT RETURN HTTP HEADERS
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER  ,1);  // RETURN THE CONTENTS OF THE CALL
 $return = curl_exec($ch);
 curl_close($ch);

Code (markup):

 

[/CODE][/QUOTE]


just use this
$postdata="title=somevalue&body=somevalue";
$ch = curl_init($posturl);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST ,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS ,$postdata);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $timeout);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION ,0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIE, $mycookies);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER ,1); // DO NOT RETURN HTTP HEADERS
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER ,1); // RETURN THE CONTENTS OF THE CALL
$return = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

 

HMmM i'm prolly wrong, but i thought if you were dealing with Multipart forms the $postdata had to be passed as an array
i was thinking it might be like
$postdata = array("title"=> "somevalue"; "body"=> "somevalue"; .....);

here is why i think that
this comes from http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-setopt.php

To make a POST in multipart/form-data mode
this worked for me, the " \n" at the end of the variables was very important on my OS X server.

<?php

$file = "file_to_upload.txt";
$submit_url = "http://www.example.com/upload_page.php";

$formvars = array("cc"=>"us \n");
$formvars[variable_1] = "bla bla \n";
$formvars[variable_2] = "bla bla \n";
$formvars[variable_3] = "bla bla \n";
$formvars[variable_4] = "bla bla \n";
$formvars[upfile] = "@$file"; // "@" causes cURL to send as file and not string (I believe)

    // init curl handle
    $ch = curl_init($submit_url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "my_cookies.txt");  //initiates cookie file if needed
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "my_cookies.txt");  // Uses cookies from previous session if exist
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://www.example.net");  //if server needs to think this post came from elsewhere
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION,1); // follow redirects recursively
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $formvars);

    // perform post
    echo $pnp_result_page = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close ($ch);

?>

PHP:

And now that I think about what this post says.. Will different servers require different formats of the postdata? Or is this all generated for you per server depending on the contents of your array?

To be honest.. I haven't read if this is against the rules, but what I'm trying to do is post to Craigslist using a PHP script. This might makes things clearer as to what I'm intending or what server I'm targeting. Thanks for the reply, octalsystems. I'm prolly talking out my ass. I'm pretty new to PHP, so be gentle if you happen to reply again and I'm way wrong. :-p

 

both are right either name value pair or array with curl

 

I'll be honest, I was a little lazy and didn't read your whole post, but here's a link to something I wrote about this on my site:
link

It might be helpful.