how to login into a remote site, and download a report in php

Question

I am attempting to log in to a remote site, then redirect to a new page once the log-in is successful. On that page, I want to select from a few drop-downs (including one date-range) and then generate a report.

Right now, I have a script which can log in to the site - but I can't figure out how to iterate through the drop-downs. Any suggestions?

$url = 'example.co.za/login'; 
$vars = array('username'=>'', 'password'=>''); 

$login = getUrl($url, 'post', $vars); 
$remotePage = getUrl($remotePageUrl); 

function getUrl($login) 
{
    $ch = curl_init();
    if ($method == 'post') 
    {
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $vars);
    }
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, 'cookies/cookies.txt');
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, 'cookies/cookies.txt');
    $buffer = curl_exec($ch);
    print_r($buffer3);
    curl_close($ch);
    return $buffer;
}

Answer 1

When submitting a form programmatically, you don't need to "select" from a dropdown. You can treat it like any other input field and pass a value for the form element. But you should pass one of the values in the dropdown, since that's what the server is expecting to receive.

For a dropdown like this:

<select name="weekday">
    <option value="Sunday">Sunday</option>
    <option value="Monday">Monday</option>
    <option value="Tuesday">Tuesday</option>
    <option value="Wednesday">Wednesday</option>
    <option value="Thursday">Thursday</option>
    <option value="Friday">Friday</option>
    <option value="Saturday">Saturday</option>
</select>

You can do a POST just like you do with the login form:

$vars = array("weekday" => "Friday");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $vars);