POST JSON Data With PHP cURL wrapper class

PHP biceps cURL 🙂

Following is the PHP cURL wrapper class which I use to make GET and POST requests. The examples are below. Disclamer:  be sure that you have permission to scrape and use the content you’re after.

This code is also available on GitHub at this link: https://github.com/Hitman666/PHPcURLWrapper

Class code and simple GET request

//CurlWrapper_static.php

class CurlWrapper {
    private static $useragents = array(            
        "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/33.0.1750.154 Safari/537.36",
        "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC1)",
        "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:28.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/28.0",
        "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_2) AppleWebKit/537.75.14 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.3 Safari/537.75.14"
    );

	private static $cookiesFile = "curlCookies.txt";

    private static function getUserAgent() {
    	$rand = rand(0, count(self::$useragents) - 1);

    	return self::$useragents[$rand];
    }

    public static function SendRequest($url, $ref = "", $type = "GET", $postData = "", $headers = "", $proxy = "") {
        $useragent = self::getUserAgent();

        $ch = curl_init();
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,120);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, self::getUserAgent());

		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true); 
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);

		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, realpath(self::$cookiesFile)); 
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, realpath(self::$cookiesFile));

		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);

        //options
        if ($ref != "") {
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $ref);
        }

		if ($proxy != "") {
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, $proxy);
		}

		if ($type == "POST"){
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST");
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postData);
		}

		if ($headers != ""){
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
		}

        $result = curl_exec($ch);
		curl_close($ch);

		return $result;
	}
}

Simple GET request:

require("CurlWrapper_static.php");

$googleHTML = CurlWrapper::SendRequest('https://www.google.com');
echo $googleHTML;

If you’re a firm non-static lover here’s a “normal” class:

//CurlWrapper_nonStatic.php

class CurlWrapper{    
    private $_useragents = array(            
        "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/33.0.1750.154 Safari/537.36",
        "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC1)",
        "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:28.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/28.0",
        "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_2) AppleWebKit/537.75.14 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.3 Safari/537.75.14"
    );

	private $_cookiesFile = "curlCookies.txt";

    private function getUserAgent(){
    	$rand = rand(0, count($this->_useragents));

    	return $useragents[$rand];
    }

    public function SendRequest($url, $ref = "", $type = "GET", $postData = "", $headers = "", $proxy = "") {
        $useragent = $this->getUserAgent();
        echo $useragent;

        $ch = curl_init();
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,120);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $useragent);

		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true); 
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);

		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, realpath($this->_cookiesFile)); 
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, realpath($this->_cookiesFile));

		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);

        //options
        if ($ref != "") {
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $ref);
        }

		if ($proxy != "") {
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, $proxy);
		}

		if ($type == "POST"){
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST");
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postData);
		}

		if ($headers != ""){
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
		}

        $result = curl_exec($ch);
		curl_close($ch);

		return $result;
	}
}

How to use it with simple GET request:

require("CurlWrapper_nonStatic.php");

$curl = new CurlWrapper();
$googleHTML = $curl->SendRequest('https://www.google.com');
echo $googleHTML;

JSON POST request

Here’s an example of sending a JSON POST request to imaginitive URL ‘http://service.com/getData.json’ with some data array:

	require("CurlWrapper_static.php");

	$cookieSettingUrl = 'http://service.com/';
	$cookie = CurlWrapper::SendRequest($cookieSettingUrl);

	$data = array(
		"year" => 2014,
		"day" => 3,
                "month" => 4,
		"id" => 20
    );
	$postData = json_encode($data);

	$jsonUrl = 'http://service.com/getData.json';
	$headers = array('Accept: application/json','Content-Type: application/json');

	$resultsHTML = CurlWrapper::SendRequest($jsonUrl, $cookieSettingUrl, "POST", $postData, $headers);
	$resultsJson = json_decode($resultsHTML);
	var_dump($resultsJson);

Important to note is that you have to add proper $headers array, and that you json_encode your data array as shown when POSTing to a service which expects JSON data.

Cookies

The reason why I first used these two lines:

$cookieSettingUrl = 'http://service.com/';
$cookie = CurlWrapper::SendRequest($cookieSettingUrl);

is to set any cookies (and you will find that some services do this) that may be needed to be sent along with the request to ‘http://service.com/getData.json’. Cookies are set to ‘curlCookies.txt’ in the CurlWrapper_* class. You can change this to your liking, and you have to make sure that you set proper permissions for this file.

Hope this proves useful to someone.

Written by Nikola Brežnjak