How to parse raw POST data into array?

Question

I have a raw form-data that look like this:

------------V2ymHFg03ehbqgZCaKO6jy
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="intro"

O
------------V2ymHFg03ehbqgZCaKO6jy
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="title"

T
------------V2ymHFg03ehbqgZCaKO6jy
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="apiKey"

98d32fdsa
------------V2ymHFg03ehbqgZCaKO6jy
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="method"

/media/add
------------V2ymHFg03ehbqgZCaKO6jy
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="upload_field"; filename="original_filename.png"
Content-Type: image/png


------------V2ymHFg03ehbqgZCaKO6jy--

(In place of second line of upload_field there are data of this file (invisible here). So my question is:

How to parse above data to have a table:

$result['intro'] 

and so on with data inside?

Answer 1

$boundary = "------------V2ymHFg03ehbqgZCaKO6jy"; // take this from content-type
$rawfields = explode($boundary,$data);
array_pop($rawfields); // drop the last -- piece
foreach ( $rawfields as $id=>$block )
{
    list($mime,$content) = explode("\r\n\r\n",$block,2); // I think it's <cr><lf> by standards, maybe check!
    if ( preg_match('/name="([^"]*)"/i',$mime,$match) )
    {
        $result[$match[1]] = $content;
        // todo: do funky stuff with other fields
    } else {
        $result[] = $content; // just in case...
    }
}

presto.

edit: you should also trim off the newline from each content block, but rtrim will chop more than one newline, so you have to get a little more creative.

Answer 2

The content-type of the overall document is multipart, with the parts being separated by the given boundary.

Each part, or message, within the multipart document is in a standard message format: header lines, followed by a blank line, followed by a sequence of bytes representing the content of that part. Both HTTP and SMTP work like this.

With header lines like Content-Disposition: form-data; name="title", you have to be careful with the name because it could be encoded (think about how to represent an arbitrary value, such as one containing a double quote mark or a newline).