Making POST request using Curl, not working

Question

I want to make a POST request to get schedule of a train number from this page: http://www.indianrail.gov.in/train_Schedule.html

I'm using this code but it is NOT working. The resulting error shown in attachment below. What could be the problem?
PS: I've got the cgi path and arguments as in $data using Firebug

$data = array('lccp_trnname' => '14553', 'getIt' => 'Get Schedule');

    $ch = curl_init();
    $useragent= "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0.1";
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $useragent); // set user agent
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.indianrail.gov.in/cgi_bin/inet_trnnum_cgi.cgi');
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);

    $txResult = curl_exec($ch);

    print "$txResult\n";

enter image description here :

indianrail.gov.in use in your site is illegal .and your URL is also wrong.FAILED IN CHK ENV 0 erro ris there — sandeep
– sandeep, Commented Mar 14, 2012 at 10:43
Added referer ("indianrail.gov.in/train_Schedule.html") to your code too and this does not seem to help. Can't see any form values missed... they have put protection in place to stop external requests though. I would recommend finding a different (more open) data source. — user1237595
– user1237595, Commented Mar 14, 2012 at 10:47

MrCode · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-14 10:50:57Z

Assuming you have permission to programatically consume the data on that site......

The problem is the way you pass the post data to cURL.

CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS

The full data to post in a HTTP "POST" operation. To post a file, prepend a filename with @ and use the full path. The filetype can be explicitly specified by following the filename with the type in the format ';type=mimetype'. This parameter can either be passed as a urlencoded string like 'para1=val1&para2=val2&...' or as an array with the field name as key and field data as value. If value is an array, the Content-Type header will be set to multipart/form-data. As of PHP 5.2.0, files thats passed to this option with the @ prefix must be in array form to work.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.curl-setopt.php

Try encoding the post data yourself and passing it as a string:

$data = array('lccp_trnname' => '14553', 'getIt' => 'Get Schedule');

$fields_string = '';
foreach($data as $key=>$value) { $fields_string .= urlencode($key).'='.urlencode($value).'&'; }
rtrim($fields_string,'&');

Then set the option:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $fields_string);

JScoobyCed · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-14 11:03:02Z

0

You need two things:

a referrer
an "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" POST data

$params = 'lccp_trnname='.urlencode('14553').'&getIt='.urlencode('Get Schedule');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $params);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://www.indianrail.gov.in/train_Schedule.html");

edited Mar 14, 2012 at 11:03

answered Mar 14, 2012 at 10:53

JScoobyCed

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1 Comment

AgA Over a year ago

Brilliant! The third line is not required. The first line did it. Thanks

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