Issue reading HTTP request body from a JSON POST in PHP

Question

I'm writing a script that is registered as an endpoint for a webhook. I know that it's successfully registered because I'm writing the header of every request to my server logs. Here's a sample:

Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8
User-Agent: Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.1
Host: =={obfuscated}== 
Content-Length: 1918

The API that I've registered with is POST-ing a JSON object to my script, and I'd like to parse that object using PHP. As you can see from the request header, there's a nice big fat JSON object waiting to be parsed. It seems straightforward, but it hasn't been.

At first I tried using $_POST['json'] or just $_POST but since the data isn't in an array, I wasn't really sure how to access it like that.

I've tried using file_get_contents('php://input') and fopen('php://input', 'r') with and without json_decode() but no luck. I can't use http_get_request_body() since the server I'm on doesn't have PECL and that's out of my control.

Are there any other ways to interact with the POST-ed JSON object that I'm missing? Thanks!

Answer 1

Thanks to others for the input. It turns out that I just needed

$inputJSON = file_get_contents('php://input');
$input = json_decode($inputJSON, TRUE); //convert JSON into array

where the second parameter in json_decode returned the object as an array.

Hope this helps someone else!

Answer 2

Even when the following works.

$inputJSON = file_get_contents('php://input');

If you want to continue using $_POST send the data as FormData

var fd = new FormData();
fd.append('key', 'value');
return axios.post('url', fd)