Ajax request to send CURL request

Question

I am submitting the data from a from via Ajax and it needs to make a curl request to an endpoint. I am not getting any errors but when I check the data in the endpoint it isn't there. If I submit the form just using normal html then it works. So, something is incorrect with my CURL code I would imagine.

<?php

  $response = [];
  $message = '';

   $data = [
        'first_name'      => $_POST['first_name'],
        'last_name'       => $_POST['last_name'],
        'email'           => $_POST['email'],
];


$options = [
    CURLOPT_URL        => 'https://someEndpoint.com?encoding=UTF-8',
    CURLOPT_POST       => true,
    CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => $data,
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => 1
];


$curl = curl_init();


curl_setopt_array($curl, $options);


$results = curl_exec($curl);


curl_close($curl);

$response['success'] = true;
$response['message'] = 'Thank you, your request has been submitted.';

echo json_encode($response);

Answer 1

You're currently passing the post fields as an array. However, cURL expects it to be passed as a string in this format:

first_name=foo&last_name=bar&...

It's just like a query string.

We can use http_build_query() to convert the array to the above format:

CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => http_build_query($data),