How to get body of a POST in php?

Question

I submit as POST to a php page the following:

{a:1}

This is the body of the request (a POST request).
In php, what do I have to do to

Answer 1

Check the $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA variable

Answer 2

http_get_request_body() was explicitly made for getting the body of PUT and POST requests as per the documentation http://php.net/manual/fa/function.http-get-request-body.php