Using Curl in PHP to click a button and get response

Question

I am trying to link our page to another, but it is on the other side of a disclaimer warning. Before everyone gets on my case for trying to do something unethical, I am merely trying to make the link easy for my user to get to a page - I am NOT scraping any information or otherwise doing something shady!

The link I am having issues with is this: https://www.bcpao.us/asp/disclaimap.asp
I am trying to press this button:

<input type="submit" name="Answer" value="Accept"\>

Here is my php/curl code:

$agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax)"; 
$url = 'https://www.bcpao.us/asp/disclaimap.asp';
$ckfile = tempnam ("d:/temp", "CURLCOOKIE");

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $ckfile);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);  
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
$data['Answer'] = "Accept";
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
// I have tried the following also:
// curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "Submit=Answer%Accept");


$output=@curl_exec($ch);
$info = @curl_getinfo($ch);

if(curl_errno($ch)){
  echo 'Curl error: ' . curl_error($ch);
}

curl_close($ch);
echo "output is:'" . $output . "'";
echo "<br>";
echo "info is:";
print_r($info);

When I run the script, I get the original page back (not the one the button links to.) Any help would be most appreciated!

Andrey Volk · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-13 12:16:01Z

3

Take a look at the form tag:

<form action="answer_disclaimap.asp" method="post" id="Form1">

You use wrong URL to disclaimap.asp. Change it to answer_disclaimap.asp:

$url = 'https://www.bcpao.us/asp/answer_disclaimap.asp';

And use http_build_query():

$data['Answer'] = "Accept";
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($data) );

edited May 13, 2013 at 12:16

answered May 13, 2013 at 12:02

Andrey Volk

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1 Comment

jordanthompson Over a year ago

Well, your fix worked perfectly, but I didn't get what I expected. Once you have accepted their terms, whenever you browse their site (as a normal user), the URL has an ID="some number" in it. This number persists for a while, but eventually times out (kind of like a cookie) so I was assuming that this number would wind up in the cookie file, but it doesn't... Any suggestions?... Nevermind - after looking at the return page's source html, I found it buried - ounce again, thanks for catching my earlier mistakes :-)

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