richardhall

How can I get the raw HTTP post data from within PHP on UH servers?

So far I've tried:
$postdata = @file_get_contents( 'php://input' );
$postdata = $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA;
$postdata = $_GLOBALS["HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA"];
But no luck so far- all return a zero bytes length string.

And my PHP.ini file reflects the following setting already (in case you were going to suggest it):
always_populate_raw_post_data = On

Any help appreciated.

Thanks,

knapper

You need to use:

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

which I just tested.

richardhall

Thats basically the same as with the @ sign in front. Returns nothing. I'm posting XML data not form data if that makes any difference. I'm using this format to make my HTTP POST:

POST / HTTP/1.1
Host: api.hostnamehere.com
User-Agent: UserAgentHere/1.0.00
Content-Type: application/xml; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 0

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<request>
<question1 param="value" />
<question2 param="value" />
<question3 param="value" />
</request>

But from the PHP script I post it to, I can't see any of the XML using file_get_contents or any of the other methods above.

knapper

Yes it does. The encoding type is critical. For example forms need to be application/x-www-form-urlencoded not multipart/form-data. Anyway, try changing Content-Type:application/xml to Content-Type:text/xml on your HTTP POST.

Edit:

Actually a bit more poking aound shows changing the Content-Type probably won't sort it but it's worth a shot. Either way php://input is the what you want.

percepts

I'm not clear on what you want to do here. Are you just trying to pick up some unknown variables or to get the header records?

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An old dog learning new tricks

Alex.

I think he's trying to access the xml being posted to the page. I've looked on some other websites, but they all seem to be using the techniques that you've tried.

As a wild stab in the dark, does increasing the value of Content-Length change anything?

richardhall

knapper: I wondered that so i've tried changing the Content-Type to a whole variety of different things and it but seems to make no ounce of difference. Behaves the same both ways.

percepts: Alex is right I want to be able to process the XML in my PHP script and then output a response XML message. An implementation similar to XML-RPC or SOAP.

Alex: If I increase the Content-Length from zero then I get HTTP 400 Bad Request response and nothing in the raw HTTP POST data again.

percepts

Yes but does the post data contain the actual xml or does it contain the url of the xml file which seem to be trying to read and if so, where is that xml file?

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richardhall

percepts: Nope its not uploading a file, the raw data text itself contains the XML.

all: No worries I got it all working now. Alex you got it- I couldn't just change the Content-Length to any value though it had to be EXACTLY the length of the XML content in bytes minus any leading or trailing spaces, carriage returns and line feeds. All works now. Ta very much!

Simon

the other option is to just remove the content length completly....

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Freelance PHP Programming
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richardhall

Wouldn't work without it!