PHP/cURL POST question

[CuriousMike]

I've been working on my first real PHP project that tracks Steam games that go on sale.
The basics work fine, and I'm trying to add functionality.

I track a games history of being on sale, and as part of the game data I collect the publisher and developer.

It works well except for when a game is rated M(mature), and Steam has an "Age Check" page in front of the games normal page (where the pub and dev data reside).

I was (still am, really) clueless as to how to solve and asked over on PHPFreaks for help.
(http://www.phpfreaks.com/forums/index.php?topic=351070.0)

I get that I'm needing to POST valid age data to the website; I'm using the "curl" library to do that.

The initial URL looks like this:
http://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/1250/#

The page looks to need these fields filled out:
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,'snr=1_agecheck_agecheck__age-gate&ageDay=1&ageMonth=1&ageYear=1990');

Curl returns me a new URL:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/1250
... which should be the direct link to the page, but when echo'ing the new URL contents, I get the age-check front door again.

Anyone have any suggestions, or perhaps attempt to help me define what I'm technically trying to do?

 

[Cogman]

ageMonth should be the name of the month (dumb, I know). so ageMonth=July. Though that won't fix your problem.

Your problem is that steam checks for a cookie and displays content based on the cookie given. In your HTTP request you need to send over cookie information. Mine for steam looks like this

Steam_Language=english; steamCC_10_0_121_5=US; browserid=5694539310646883797; birthtime=331282801; lastagecheckage=1-July-1980; recentapps=%7B%221250%22%3A1325863982%7D; timezoneOffset=-25200,0

 

[Crusty]

Cogman's correct, I'm pretty sure curl has a facility to maintain cookies for you. Shouldn't be too difficult to add.

 

[CuriousMike]

Thanks guys, I'll give it a try tonight when I'm home.

 

[CuriousMike]

Cogman - Thank you!
I'm hip to cookies being stored on the client, but oblivious that they would be sent back to the server (?)

I'm sure I have a superfluous option below, but this works.

<?php
$ckfile = tempnam ("/", "CURLCOOKIE");

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $ckfile);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL, 'http://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/9050/#'); 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,'snr=1_agecheck_agecheck__age-gate&ageDay=1&ageMonth=May&ageYear=1990');

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120122 Firefox/3.0.5");
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_FRESH_CONNECT,true);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_UNRESTRICTED_AUTH,true);

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $ckfile);
$myPage = curl_exec($ch);
if ($myPage)
{
    echo ('success<br>');
    echo ($myPage);
}
else
    echo ('fail<br>');
?>

 

[Crusty]

Well what good would a cookie be if you it was write only to the client? The general idea is the server will give the client a piece of encoded data that identifies that client as a unique client. Then on every request the client sends that data back to the server so the server now has a way to look up which session in memory the incoming request belongs to.

Glad you got it working!

 

[CuriousMike]

Well what good would a cookie be if you it was write only to the client?

I suppose I wasn't really thinking about it... der.

For my site, I'm using server-side session data which works well, but has caused me some issues that I think a cookie solution might solve.

That'll be round 2.