Help reading a response from an outside page

[tomecafe]

Hello everybody! this is my first post here

 

This is my problem.. Im setting up a payment system with a merchant company.. they give VERY vague technical help couse they want to sell you their service for an outrageous $800 just to integrate your shopping cart with their payment gateway.. here is the thing.. i POST all of the transaction information from my www.web1.com/checkout.php into their www.merchant2.com/gateway.php4 but i was hoping that in all of the variables i was sending the gateway there was going to be a return_url or something like that.. instead.. they just gave me a text file with the 2 possible answers I can get from the gateway.php4..  so without a return_url when a client on my site checks out.. he ends up in a page like www.merchant2.com/gateway.php4 with a text response code like this

 

TRANSACTION_ID=1234 STATUS=OK AUTHORIZATION_CODE=123456789 BILL_DESCRIPTOR=whatever goods company

 

now.. how can i read this response that is NOT on my server? someone told me that there must be something like this

 

$ret = response("www.merchant2.com/gateway.php4", 'VARS_POST'); 

 

where in the vars_post i put all the variables im sending the gateway.php4 and the response gets save to $ret as a String or Array?

 

anybody has any idea on how should i accomplish this?

 

Once again thanks for your time.. ! and sorry for my so so english!

 

Greetings from Argentina

 

[btherl]

Curl can help you here.  It will take a bit of time to get used to, but it can do what you need.

[tomecafe]

thanks.. using google i found some examples that im going to try.. the thing is that on most examples i saw they us Curl to a dll page.. like www.merchant2.com/gateway.dll and on the one i need to make it is www.merchant2.com/gateway.PHP <--- will it still work?

[btherl]

Yes it will work.  Well, the fetching of the result will work the same way, whether it's php or dll (or asp or aspx or php5 or php4 etc etc).  What you'll get in either case is a string as the result, which you'll then need to interpret.