Calling a SOAP web service from PHP

Question

I've never done this before so I'm completely in the dark. I'm using PHP and I need to call a SOAP service running on a remote server that responds to a call with a status code. How exactly do I make a call? The service is running on a specific ip/port and it has a name, ie: http://1.2.3.4:1000/ServiceName?1234 where 1234 is a parameter I'm passing and for which I expect an answer from the service.

Please give me a few guidelines, thanks!

Answer 1

Assuming you have allow_url_fopen on (usually true), it may be as simple as...

$response = file_get_contents('http://1.2.3.4:1000/ServiceName?1234');

Answer 2

For very simple request/response sets, you can basically do

 $response = file_get_contents('http://1.2.3.4:1000/ServiceName?1234');

If you need to do anything "special", like authenticate to the server, log in, process cookies, etc... you'd be better off using cURL instead, or look at the streams wrapper stuff.