How to post JSON to PHP with curl

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I may be way off base, but I've been trying all afternoon to run the curl post command in this recess PHP framework tutorial. What I don't understand is how is PHP supposed to interpret my POST, it always comes up as an empty array.

curl -i -X POST -d '{"screencast":{"subject":"tools"}}'  /
      http://localhost:3570/index.php/trainingServer/screencast.json

(The slash in there is just to make me not look like an idiot, but I executed this from windows using PHP 5.2, also tried on a Linux server, same version with Linux curl)

There must be something I'm missing because it seems pretty straightforward, the post just isn't be interpreted right, if it was, everything would work great.

This is what I get back:

HTTP/1.1 409 Conflict
Date: Fri, 01 May 2009 22:03:00 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.8 (Win32) PHP/5.2.6
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.6
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

{"screencast":{"id":null,"subject":null,"body":null,
         "dataUrl":null,"dataMedium":null,"createdOn":null,"author":null}}

php rest post

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asked May 1 '09 at 22:03

Peter Turner
1,53211028

78% accept rate

Could you please copy-paste your .php file as well? Are you sure that the URL localhost:3570/index.php/trainingServer/screencast.jsonruns your script? It doesn't look like a PHP URL. – pts May 1 '09 at 22:11

@pts; Peter is using an MVC framework of some kind, take a look at index.php in that URL. – Alan Storm May 1 '09 at 23:59

@pts I'm using Delphi for PHP (hence the :3570) and the Recess MVC framework w/out .htaccess file, hence the index.php/ in the url. – Peter Turner May 4 '09 at 13:22

1 

Don’t forget to send it as application/json. – Gumbo♦ Aug 16 '09 at 11:30

You need to escape your quotation marks, dude. – Peter Turner Jan 20 at 11:50

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4 Answers

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up vote 20 down voteaccepted

Jordans analysis of why the $_POST-array isn't populated is correct. However, you can use

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

to just retrieve the http body and handle it yourself. See PHP input/output streams.

From a protocol perspective this is actually more correct, since you're not really processing http multipart form data anyway. Also, use application/json as content-type when posting your request.

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edited May 1 '09 at 22:16

answered May 1 '09 at 22:10

Emil H
10.4k2042

Nice answer. +1 – Jordan S. Jones May 1 '09 at 22:32

1 

Doing json_decode(file_get_contents("php://input"), true) worked. Thanks – Peter Turner May 4 '09 at 14:25

Really helped my situation as well! Thanks Emil H! – Steve Oct 13 '09 at 17:05

up vote 9 down vote

Normally -d is interpreted as form-encoded. You need the -H parameter:

curl -v -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST -d '{"screencast":{"subject":"tools"}}' / http://localhost:3570/index.php/trainingServer/screencast.json

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answered Dec 3 '09 at 0:36

Jim Carrig
9111

up vote -1 down vote

You should escape the quotes like this:

curl -i -X POST -d '{/"screencast/":{/"subject/":/"tools/"}}'  /
  http://localhost:3570/index.php/trainingServer/screencast.json

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answered Aug 16 '09 at 11:26

Josef Richter

up vote 4 down vote

I believe you are getting an empty array because PHP is expecting the posted data to be in a Querystring format (key=value&key1=value1).

Try changing your curl request to:

curl -i -X POST -d 'json={"screencast":{"subject":"tools"}}'  /
      http://localhost:3570/index.php/trainingServer/screencast.json

and see if that helps any.

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