Construct A PHP POST Request With Binary Data

I'm trying to construct a PHP POST request that includes some binary data, following on from a previous StackOverflow question. The data is being submitted to this API call: http:/

Solution 1:

CURL can accept a raw array of key=>value pairs for POST fields. There's no need to do all that urlencode() and http_build_query() stuff. Most likely the @ in the array is being mangled into %40, so CURL doesn't see it as a file upload attempt.

$fields = array(
    'mediaupload'=>$file_field,
    'username'=> $_POST["username"),
    etc...

curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$fields);

Solution 2:

The http_build_query function generates a URL encoded query string which means that the "@file.ext" is URL encoded in the output as a string and cURL doesn't know that you're trying to upload a file.

My advice would be not to include the file to upload in the http_build_query call and included manually in the CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS.

$file = $_FILES['mediaupload'];
$file_field="@$file[tmp_name]";
$fields = array(
    'username'=>urlencode($_POST["username"]),
    'password'=>urlencode($_POST["password"]),
    'latitude'=>urlencode($_POST["latitude"]),
    'longitude'=>urlencode($_POST["longitude"]),
    'datetime'=>urlencode($_POST["datetime"]),
    'category'=>urlencode($_POST["category"]),
    'metacategory'=>urlencode($_POST["metacategory"]),
    'caption'=>urlencode($_POST["description"])
);
$fields_string = http_build_query($fields);
echo 'FIELDS STRING: ' . $fields_string;
$url = 'https://www.cyclestreets.net/api/addphoto.json?key=$key';
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, 'mediaupload=' . $file_field . '&' . $fields_string);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$response = curl_exec ($ch);