How to get Form Field with php?

[Lukeidiot]

I am trying to find this form field "form_key" on tumblr.com

 

If you view source on: http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard

 

On firefox it shows this:

<form style="width:0px; height:0px; overflow:hidden; position:absolute;"
                method="post" action="/set_avatar" id="set_avatar_form"
                enctype="multipart/form-data"> 
                    <input type="hidden" name="form_key"
                    value="jg351pzpvzMSkyJIZZhkT7AfcQ"/> 
                    <input type="file" name="set_avatar" id="set_avatar"
                    onchange="$('set_avatar_form').submit();"/> 
                    <input type="hidden" name="redirect_to" value="/dashboard"/> 
                </form> 

 

But when I use php's file_get_content("http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard");

That data is no where to be found.

 

Any idea how I can get that form data in my php file? For example I am trying to use regex preg_match_all to extract the form_key, but get_file_contents doesnt show the <form></form>

[objnoob]

get_file_contents will not retreive the html of a URL.

 

You should use the cURL extension and set option return transfer to true.

[Lukeidiot]

get_file_contents will not retreive the html of a URL.

 

You should use the cURL extension and set option return transfer to true.

 

I am using cURL, but can you show me an example on how to use it to get the html?

[BlueSkyIS]

get_file_contents will not retreive the html of a URL.

 

You should use the cURL extension and set option return transfer to true.

 

file_get_contents() will get the HTML of many URLs.

[Lukeidiot]

get_file_contents will not retreive the html of a URL.

 

You should use the cURL extension and set option return transfer to true.

 

file_get_contents() will get the HTML of many URLs.

get_file_contents will not retreive the html of a URL.

 

You should use the cURL extension and set option return transfer to true.

 

file_get_contents() will get the HTML of many URLs.

 

Not sure if that was a mispell, but "file_get_content()" is not a php function.

 

It also doesnt get <form> html for some reason. I just dont know how to use cURL's returntransfer to read html.

 

If anyone can tell me how to use cURL to get html, I would love you. Thanks!

 

[BlueSkyIS]

what you get from a URL depends on how the server sends it. this code gets form html for me, from this particular site:

 

$content = file_get_contents("http://www.headshopfinder.com/head-shop-finder.html");
echo "content: $content";

 

what i'm sort of driving at is the server might check to see if you are a real web browser or not and serve content dependent on that. if you perform a file_get_contents() and get nothing, it's likely that either a client-side script is in play and/or the server won't send because it knows you aren't a browser.

[objnoob]

Ok, I'll shut up now! 

[BlueSkyIS]

here is part of the code i have used to download full HTML from websites:

 

$out = $fopen("/location/to/output/file.txt",'w');
$url = "http://www.somewebsite.com/somepage.html";

$source = fopen($url,"r");
while ($a = fread($source,1024)) {
	$page .= $a;
}

fwrite($out, $page);
fclose($out);

fclose($source);

[BlueSkyIS]

on the other hand, objNoob is completely correct that you'll want to user curl functions if you need to spoof a browser in any way: cookies, referrer, user-agent, etc., etc.

[Lukeidiot]

Yeah the file_get_contents doesnt work for this server. Does anyone know how I can use cURL to get the HTML Source?

[objnoob]

Yes!

 

$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$html = curl_exec($ch);

[Lukeidiot]

Yes!

 

$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$html = curl_exec($ch);

 

That just loads the site though, I dont see any HTML

[objnoob]

Don't echo $html.  Use RegEx or DOMDocument Class to extract form_key value from $html.

[Lukeidiot]

Don't echo $html.  Use RegEx or DOMDocument Class to extract form_key value from $html.

 

So like this?

<?php
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/7.0.517.44 Safari/534.7");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "c:/xampp/htdocs/tumcookie.txt");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "c:/xampp/htdocs/tumcookie.txt");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "www.tumblr.com/dashboard");

$login = curl_exec ($curl);

preg_match_all('~name="form_key" value="([^"]+)"~', $login, $matches);
echo $matches[0];

curl_close ($curl);	
?>

[objnoob]

If that works for you