How do I read the POST Body

chickenleg

Basically I have data being posted to me which is not from a form. I need to read this data but because its not coming from a form I can't use the $HTTP_POST_VARS Variable. (and since php seems to deal with the standard input for you im not sure how to read it.)

In Perl I would just use the STDIN and content_lenght to read the POST body but I have found no way in PHP to do the same.

Is there a way? It seems strange that there would be a $CONTENT_LENGTH Environmental Variable but no way to read the body of the post to that length.

Any help would be appreciated.

Ricky

_SuperString

try this:

foreach ($_REQUEST as $key=>$value) 
{ 
echo $key.' => '.$value;
}

chickenleg

It didn't work 🙁 Keep them suggestions coming in. 😉

_SuperString

were is this data comming from anyway, and do you know the identifier name (if any) ??

chickenleg

The data is XML (i.e. $CONTENT_TYPE returns: text/xml) posted to me from an SMS-Gateway, I don't think there is an identifier name.

_SuperString

hmmm, try this :

foreach ($_GET as $out)
{
echo $out;
}

chickenleg

Nope this didn't work. 🙁 (although $REQUEST_METHOD is returning as POST so It probably wouldn't) :/

I've also tried this:

$stdin=file("php://stdin");

Which I saw somewhere and that never worked, neither did:

$stdin=file("/dev/stdin");

Which It says I should use if PHP version is less than 3.0.15. (I figured I got nothing to lose by trying, even though im using PHP 4) 😃

chickenleg

I searched the net and on a german site (thank you googles page translator) which just happened to be the PHP Maunal, (Probably the logical place for me to check 😉 ) I found this:

You wants need to use $$HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA to of ACCESS the raw DATA directly. (This should return A CoPy OF the DATA given to the PHP process on STDIN; note that you wan't able tons of open STDIN and READ it yourself because PHP already did in such a way itself.)

The translation wasn't great but it was easy to work out the variable:

$HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA

And I now have all the XML stored in my database. 🙂

Thanks for the help.

_SuperString

good show 🙂