PHP: make post request with cURL

I’m using the following simple PHP script to make post requests. If you need to upload a file instead, check my article: “upload a file with cURL”.

<?php

function postRequest($url, $curl_data) {
$options = array(
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
CURLOPT_HEADER => false,
CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,
CURLOPT_ENCODING => "",
CURLOPT_USERAGENT => "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/1.0.154.53 Safari/525.19",
CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER => true,
CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 9,
CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 15,
CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 3,
CURLOPT_POST => 1,
CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => $curl_data,
CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST => 0,
CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => false,
CURLOPT_VERBOSE => 1,
CURLOPT_PROXY => null // if using a proxy, use the syntax "proxyuser:proxypass@proxyurl:proxyport"
);

$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
$content = curl_exec($ch);
$err = curl_errno($ch);
$errmsg = curl_error($ch) ;
$header = curl_getinfo($ch);
curl_close($ch);

$header['errno'] = $err;
$header['errmsg'] = $errmsg;
$header['content'] = $content;
return $header;
}
echo print_r(postRequest("http://targeturl.com", "fieldA=valueA&fieldB=valueB"), true);

?>