How to receive and handle an XML file requested through POST in PHP5?

I want to use simeplexml class in PHP5 to handle a small XML file. But to obtain that file, script has to send a specific POST request to a remote server that will "give" me an XML file in return. So I believe I can't use the "simplexml_load_file" method. This file is needed just for processing, then it can, or even should, be gone/deleted. I've got HTTP HEADER of this type

$header = 'POST '.$gateway.' HTTP/1.0'."\r\n" .
          'Host: '.$server."\r\n".
          'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded'."\r\n".
          'Content-Length: '.strlen($param)."\r\n".
          'Connection: close'."\r\n\r\n";

And not much idea of wh开发者_C百科at to do next with that. There is fsockopen but I'm not sure if that would be appropriate or how to go with it.

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My advice would be use something like Zend_Http_Client library or cURL. Getting everything right with fsockopen will be a pain to debug.

Zend_Http_Client has a nice interface and would work fabulously.

CURL isn't too much of a pain either and is already a part of most PHP builds. Example below:

$ch = curl_init();
// set URL and other appropriate options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.example.com/"); // Replace with your URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); 
$output = curl_exec($ch) // Return the XML string of data

// Parse output to Simple XML
// You'll probably want to do some validation here to validate that the returned output is XML
$xml = simplexml_load_string($output); 

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I'd use an HTTP client library like Zend_Http_Client (or cURL if you're a masochist) to create the POST request, then feed the response body into simplexml_load_string or SimpleXMLElement::__construct()