How to properly format body for post request?

Question

I'm using a firefox pluing called restclient to simulate a post request. It doesnt' seem to be picking up any post data, but not sure if I'm formatting it properly.

using header: Content-Type: application/json and body: {"id":1234}

but not go, it's not picking up the id parameter in my php, is there some special formatting I need to set?

Solution 1

okay, got it working, here is what is needed

two content types:

Content-Type: application/json
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

and then set your params like so in body:

param1=value1&param2=value2

Thanks for the help everyone.

Solution 2

PHP will not parse a JSON body automatically into the $_POST superglobal. That only happens with application/x-www-form-urlencoded and multipart/form-data POST bodies. That said, you can parse the body yourself — you can access the raw POST body via the php://input pseudo-stream.

Comments

[Rob]

ok, i'ave added Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded, still no go, am I missing something else? I just want to simulate a POST request.

[lanzz]

Yes. Your actual body content is JSON, it is not enough to just lie the server about what you're sending. You either have to actually encode the body in application/x-www-form-urlencoded format, or you need to handle the JSON explicitly on the backend.

[Quasdunk]

This might work, but is not really correct. Your content can't have several types. It's just one type which in this case is Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded. JSON looks something like {'key1':'value1','key2':'value2','key3':'value3'}, and if you had that you would have to set the header to Content-Type: application/json. Appearently, now your server simply picks the last header. But this example should also work if you omit the misleading one, since it is not JSON.

[Quasdunk]

So, when working with url-encoded key-value pairs like param1=value1&param2=value2, the correct Content-Type is application/x-www-form-urlencoded and you can access it through the $_POST-array on the server side. If you have JSON data like {'key1':'value1','key2':'value2','key3':'value3'}, set the content-type to application/json and you can turn the data into an array on the server side with $data_array = json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'), true);