What is the best way to transfer data from database using curl

Question

I have been reading a lot about php CURL and I still couldn't grasp the mechanism of it sending data, it seems that it is not possible to send php array or php object straight away from a database using curl, but it seems to be possible to send the data using JSON as curl return the data as strings, but I have read somewhere that it is possible to make the php array or object as a post data and send it through curl (kinda like ajax I guess). However I have not found the clean and proper tutorial or examples regarding this.

I hope that anyone that has enough knowledge about curl would share an example on how to properly send data, say from from mysql database using curl as an array / object / JSON. Hope it can be useful for anyone looking for ways to send data cross-domain using curl in the future.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

cURL makes HTTP requests. It can make an HTTP request to an HTTP server and it can get an HTTP response from an HTTP server.

It can't communicate with a database. It can communicate with an HTTP server that runs a server side program (which could be written in PHP) which gets data from a database, formats it in an HTTP response and sends that.

An HTTP request or response can include text. A PHP array is not text. A PHP object is not text. JSON is text. The json_encode function will convert a PHP array into a JSON text.

Answer 2

You can't send the data as array using cURL, So your best bet at this point is to send it using JSON. Which you can do the following way..

$data = array("name" => "Hagrid", "age" => "36");                                                                    
$data_string = json_encode($data);                                                                                   

$ch = curl_init('http://your-url-to-post-the-data');                                                                      
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST");                                                                     
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data_string);                                                                  
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);                                                                      
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(                                                                          
    'Content-Type: application/json',                                                                                
    'Content-Length: ' . strlen($data_string))                                                                       
);                                                                                                                   

$result = curl_exec($ch);

You can also follow the instructions from POSTing JSON Data With PHP cURL