SOAP - How to access raw HTTP POST data?

[searchhippo]

While working with a SOAP project, I came across a problem. When there is an HTTP POST request to a page, there appear to be two possibilities:
- name/value pairs which end up nicely in HTTP_POST_VARS
or
- a file upload occurred with the appropriate multipart/mime form encoding, and the data appears nicely in HTTP_POST_FILES.

However, with SOAP, XMLRPC, and many other web services, it does not appear to be possible to actually get the posted data. That is, an XML document is POSTed to the server, so it is neither of the above two cases. Is there some mechanism and/or variable which contains the raw unparsed data that was POSTed to a php page? If so, what is it?

[searchhippo]

well, considering nobody replied but i did just find the answer, i'll reply to myself. There is a variable called "$HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA" which contains the data posted.