What is the best practice for automatically submitting a form in PHP?

When automatically submitting a form in PHP, the best practice is to use cURL to send a POST request to the form's action URL with the necessary form data. This allows you to programmatically submit the form without having to interact with the form on the front end.

<?php

// URL of the form action
$url = 'https://example.com/form';

// Form data to be submitted
$data = array(
    'field1' => 'value1',
    'field2' => 'value2',
    // Add more fields as needed
);

// Initialize cURL session
$ch = curl_init();

// Set cURL options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

// Execute cURL session
$response = curl_exec($ch);

// Close cURL session
curl_close($ch);

// Handle response as needed
echo $response;

?>