Newbie: grab info from a site

[steve]

Hi,

I am a *complete* newbie to PHP.
After trying various things I managed to post in a site that contains a form where you enter a postal code and returns some info.

The problem is how can i NOT display but *grab* (store) the information that i get back corresponding to that postal code?
I can grab a web page into a file by using the PHP FILE command, but how do I do that for a post?

Any help/guidance/links ould be greately appreciated.

TIA
-steve

[Colin McKinnon]

steve wrote:

>
> The problem is how can i NOT display but *grab* (store) the information
> that i get back corresponding to that postal code? I can grab a web page
> into a file by using the PHP FILE command, but how do I do that for a
> post?
>
> Any help/guidance/links ould be greately appreciated.
>

AFAIK POST is not support by the url-wrappers (file system functions e.g.
file(...)). If you have libcurl built into PHP you can use that
([url]http://uk.php.net/manual/en/ref.curl.php[/url]), or you can use a socket
connection ([url]http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.fsockopen.php[/url]) and roll
your own HTTP handler. You could even do it client side using hidden
iframes and javascripts (but that's likely to get messy).

HTH

C.