REST request data can't be read in 'put' method

Question

I\'m trying to develop a RESTful API with PHP without using frameworks. While processing the request, the client data cannot be read using this: parse_str(file_get_con

Answer 1

Could it be that there's something wrong with the web server?

Actually yes. After banging my head on this for a few hours, I found that the culprit for the missing data was this:

Note: Prior to PHP 5.6, a stream opened with php://input could only be read once

Another piece of code was accessing the php://input before my code, and on servers with php < 5.6, this caused the input to be lost.

Only on PUT requests that is.

Answer 2

The parse_str is used to parse a query string(in form arg1=xyz&arg2=abc) and not JSON. You need to use json_decode to parse JSON strings.

$data = json_decode(file_get_contents("php://input"), true);

Here is the code that works:

$method = strtolower($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD']);
$data = array();

switch ($method) {
    case 'get':
        $data = $_GET;
        break;
    case 'post':
        $data = $_POST;
        break;
    case 'put':
        $data = json_decode(file_get_contents("php://input"), true);
        break;
}

var_dump($data);

Curl command:

curl -i -X PUT -d '{"name":"a","data":"data1"}' http://my-server/my.php

Response:

array(2) {
  ["name"]=>
  string(1) "a"
  ["data"]=>
  string(5) "data1"
}