PHP curl请求奇怪的参数

Question

I'm trying to automate signing up for classes (cause im allways forgetting to do it) When i manually sign up it uses this url for classes on a specific day:

https://URL.com/public/tickets.php?PRESET%5BTickets%5D%5Bname%5D%5B%5D=&PRESET%5BTickets%5D%5Bday%5D%5B%5D=2018-03-04

which decodes into

https://URL.com/public/tickets.php?PRESET[Tickets][name][]=&PRESET[Tickets][day][]=2018-03-04

But im having the hardest time translating this into a curl request. I've (amongst other things) tried

$data = array("PRESET" => array("Tickets" => array("name"=>array(""), "day"=> array("2018-03-02"))));

and

$data = array('PRESET[Tickets][naam][]=', 'PRESET[Tickets][naam][]=');

But i allways get a page where no day has been selected. Sometimes there is a php error on the page about a parameter that is expected to be an array.

this is my curl request

curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $targetSite);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $this->cookie);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $this->cookie);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);

Can someone tell me how to properly send the parameters with the curl request? Thanks!

Answer 1

when you put it into CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, you're putting it into the request body, not the request URL. furthermore, when you give CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS an array, curl will encode it in multipart/form-data -format, but you need it urlencoded (which is different from multipart/form-data). remove all the POST code, and use http_build_query to build the url,

curl_setopt ( $ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://URL.com/public/tickets.php?" . http_build_query ( array (
        'PRESET' => array (
                'Tickets' => array (
                        'name' => array (
                                0 => '' 
                        ),
                        'day' => array (
                                0 => '2018-03-04' 
                        ) 
                ) 
        ) 
) ) );

and protip, you can use parse_str() to decode urls into php arrays, and furthermore, you can use var_export to get valid php code to create that array at runtime, and finally, as shown above, you can use http_build_query to convert that array back to an url, that's what i did here.