Execute a HTTP POST Using PHP CURL

From: http://davidwalsh.name/execute-http-post-php-curl

A customer recently brought to me a unique challenge. My customer wants information request form data to be collected in a database. Nothing new, right? Well, there's a hurdle -- the information isn't going to be saved on the localhost database -- it needs to be stored in a remote database that I cannot connect directly to.

I thought about all of the possible solutions for solving this challenge and settled on this flow:

1. User will submit the form, as usual.
2. In the form processing PHP, I use cURL to execute a POST transmission to a PHP script on the customer's server.
3. The remote script would do a MySQL INSERT query into the customer's private database.

This solution worked quite well so I thought I'd share it with you. Here's how you execute a POST using the PHP CURL library.

//extract data from the post
extract($_POST);

//set POST variables
$url = 'http://domain.com/get-post.php';
$fields = array(
            'lname'=>urlencode($last_name),
            'fname'=>urlencode($first_name),
            'title'=>urlencode($title),
            'company'=>urlencode($institution),
            'age'=>urlencode($age),
            'email'=>urlencode($email),
            'phone'=>urlencode($phone)
        );

//url-ify the data for the POST
foreach($fields as $key=>$value) { $fields_string .= $key.'='.$value.'&'; }
rtrim($fields_string,'&');

//open connection
$ch = curl_init();

//set the url, number of POST vars, POST data
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST,count($fields));
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$fields_string);

//execute post
$result = curl_exec($ch);

//close connection
curl_close($ch);

How would you have solved this problem?