HTTP Response

I'm working on a custom shopping cart for my wife's small work-at-home business. The cart is working as expected and I'm up where I need to transmit the data to the payment gateway.

Using a secure connection, we are transmitting the necessary data to the gateway. I have a form setup with the form action set to the gateway's server.

I can't seem to wrap my head around how to read the response from the gateway. The transaction responses are returned in the body of the HTTP
response in a query string name/value format delimited by ampersands. For
example: variable1=value1&variable2=value2&variable3=value3

So, once the buyer clicks "Checkout", the info is sent to the gateway, but how do I read the response?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated. (My wife bakes great cookies).

take a look at the Zend framework's Http_Client, makes stuff like this really easy:
http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.http.html

Thanks GJay, I'll take a look.

But, in doing a little research it seems like this could be done fairly easily with cUrl.

Any thoughts?

Yes, you should be using curl for this, though you can use list() to break apart the string if you really want to do it that way.

<?php
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.example.com/");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

vs.

$client = new Zend_Http_Client('http://www.example.com');
$response = $client->request();
echo $response->getBody();


I know which one I'm more likely to understand in 6 months time, but in the simple case there isn't a lot in it.

I went from using cURL to SOAP to Zend. I'd recommend using Zend as well if you can. Don't be inimidated by the framework.

Thanx for the thoughts, guys. I'll checkout Zend.