Reading JSON POST using PHP

Question

I looked around a lot before posting this question so my apologies if it is on another post and this is only my second quesiton on here so apologies if I don\'t format this

Answer 1

You have empty $_POST. If your web-server wants see data in json-format you need to read the raw input and then parse it with JSON decode.

You need something like that:

$json = file_get_contents('php://input');
$obj = json_decode($json);

Also you have wrong code for testing JSON-communication...

CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS tells curl to encode your parameters as application/x-www-form-urlencoded. You need JSON-string here.

UPDATE

Your php code for test page should be like that:

$data_string = json_encode($data);

$ch = curl_init('http://webservice.local/');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data_string);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
        'Content-Type: application/json',
        'Content-Length: ' . strlen($data_string))
);

$result = curl_exec($ch);
$result = json_decode($result);
var_dump($result);

Also on your web-service page you should remove one of the lines header('Content-type: application/json');. It must be called only once.

Answer 2

Hello this is a snippet from an old project of mine that uses curl to get ip information from some free ip databases services which reply in json format. I think it might help you.

$ip_srv = array("http://freegeoip.net/json/$this->ip","http://smart-ip.net/geoip-json/$this->ip");

getUserLocation($ip_srv);

Function:

function getUserLocation($services) {

        $ctx = stream_context_create(array('http' => array('timeout' => 15))); // 15 seconds timeout

        for ($i = 0; $i < count($services); $i++) {

            // Configuring curl options
            $options = array (
                CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true, // return web page
                //CURLOPT_HEADER => false, // don't return headers
                CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array('Content-type: application/json'),
                CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true, // follow redirects
                CURLOPT_ENCODING => "", // handle compressed
                CURLOPT_USERAGENT => "test", // who am i
                CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER => true, // set referer on redirect
                CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 5, // timeout on connect
                CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 5, // timeout on response
                CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10 // stop after 10 redirects
            ); 

            // Initializing curl
            $ch = curl_init($services[$i]);
            curl_setopt_array ( $ch, $options );

            $content = curl_exec ( $ch );
            $err = curl_errno ( $ch );
            $errmsg = curl_error ( $ch );
            $header = curl_getinfo ( $ch );
            $httpCode = curl_getinfo ( $ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE );

            curl_close ( $ch );

            //echo 'service: ' . $services[$i] . '</br>';
            //echo 'err: '.$err.'</br>';
            //echo 'errmsg: '.$errmsg.'</br>';
            //echo 'httpCode: '.$httpCode.'</br>';
            //print_r($header);
            //print_r(json_decode($content, true));

            if ($err == 0 && $httpCode == 200 && $header['download_content_length'] > 0) {

                return json_decode($content, true);

            } 

        }
    }

Answer 3

you can put your json in a parameter and send it instead of put only your json in header:

$post_string= 'json_param=' . json_encode($data);

//open connection
$ch = curl_init();

//set the url, number of POST vars, POST data
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post_string);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://webservice.local/');  // Set the url path we want to call

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

//see the results
$json=json_decode($result,true);
curl_close($curl);
print_r($json);

on the service side you can get your json string as a parameter:

$json_string = $_POST['json_param'];
$obj = json_decode($json_string);

then you can use your converted data as object.