I'm building an API using PHP.
What do I need to do to recognize a JSON encoded request?
Does it come with a certain request type?
How do I get just the request body so that I can json_decode it?
+1
A:
RFC 4627 recommends the mime type application/json. You can read the request data with php://input.
Matthew Flaschen
2010-05-05 03:07:38
thank you. php://input is what i was looking for.
john
2010-05-05 03:56:07
A:
The mime type for json is application/json, but I doubt that has caught on yet to add that to responses.
The easiest way to spot a json response is that it will most likely be wrapped in curly braces and have colons after each member. But that still isn't a sure fire way to know it's json.
The easiest way to test it from PHP is to try to json_decode it, if it throws an error, either it's not json, or it's not well-formed json and thus you won't be able to use it anyway.
Anthony
2010-05-05 03:08:20
i know what json looks like. the question is json_decode what? how do i get the 'json-encoded payload' to run json_decode on?
john
2010-05-05 03:13:36
Ah, so I left you a comment in the main question. Are they passing it as POST? or are you actually retrieving it?
Anthony
2010-05-05 03:19:13
So if it's POST, it would depend on if it had a variable name. I would try both of the following: `print_r($_POST)`, to see if POST is still an array, and if so, what the json is keyed to, and I would try: `json_decode($_POST)`. If I had to guess, it's a little of both: `json_decode($_POST[0])`
Anthony
2010-05-05 03:22:01