POST Form bot with PHP & cURL

<?php

//       _____                      _                   _     _           _
//      |  ___|__  _ __ _ __ ___   (_)_ __  _ __  _   _| |_  | |__   ___ | |_
//      | |_ / _ \| '__| '_ ` _ \  | | '_ \| '_ \| | | | __| | '_ \ / _ \| __|
//      |  _| (_) | |  | | | | | | | | | | | |_) | |_| | |_  | |_) | (_) | |_
//      |_|  \___/|_|  |_| |_| |_| |_|_| |_| .__/ \__,_|\__| |_.__/ \___/ \__|
//      __        ___ _   _        ____ ___|_|____  _____   _
//      \ \      / (_) |_| |__    / ___/ ___||  _ \|  ___| | |__  _   _ _ __   __ _ ___ ___
//       \ \ /\ / /| | __| '_ \  | |   \___ \| |_) | |_    | '_ \| | | | '_ \ / _` / __/ __|
//        \ V  V / | | |_| | | | | |___ ___) |  _ <|  _|   | |_) | |_| | |_) | (_| \__ \__ \
//         \_/\_/  |_|\__|_| |_|  \____|____/|_| \_\_|     |_.__/ \__, | .__/ \__,_|___/___/
//                 by Erik Keresztes (fiverr.com/erik_keresztes)  |___/|_|


function getStringBetween($string, $start, $end)
{
    $string = ' ' . $string; // add space to start of string

    // find ending position of $start
    $startpos = strpos($string, $start);
    if (!$startpos) return ''; // if can't find $start in $string return empty string
    $startpos += strlen($start);

    // get length between $start and $end
    $length = strpos($string, $end, $startpos) - $startpos;

    return substr($string, $startpos, $length);
}

$url = 'redacted';
$cookies = realpath('cookies.txt');
$userAgent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/32.0.1700.107 Chrome/32.0.1700.107 Safari/537.36';





// FIRST REQUEST (to get the token)

$ch = curl_init(); // open connection

// set curl options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $userAgent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookies);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookies);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

// execute request and get webpage source
$result = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch); // close connection

// get CSRF token from webpage source
$token = getStringBetween($result, '<meta name="csrf-token" content="', '">');





// SECOND REQUEST

// set POST variables
$fields = array(
   '_token' => $token,
   'type' => 'unknown',
   'rating' => 5,
   'comment' => 'This is a test'),
   'name' => 'POST bot'
);

// build the urlencoded data
$postfields = http_build_query($fields);

$ch = curl_init(); // open curl connection

// set curl options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $userAgent);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookies);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookies);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, count($fields));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postfields);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

curl_exec($ch); // execute post

curl_close($ch); // close connection

?>