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PayPal API Listener Website Payments Standard URI

Answer 1

A:

When the IPN hits your script you should post back to:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_notify-validate&amp;&lt;all the junk they posted you>
(or https://www.sandbox.paypal.com/...)

Then check the response body of that for VERIFIED.

If all of that's giving you some HTML, what is it?

Alex K. 2010-08-05 12:30:02

Aha! I thought the data went back in the POST body, not in the URL itself. I'll give that a whirl and see what happens. I was using `CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS`.

TRiG 2010-08-05 14:29:53

Nope. still getting back full HTML. I'll edit my question and paste it in.

TRiG 2010-08-05 14:39:13

Nope, rereading their sample code, it should go in the POST body, not the URL. But I'm still getting back a full HTML page.

TRiG 2010-08-12 15:37:17

Answer 2

A:

I've got this sorted now, by using their provided sample code and tweaking it slightly to put in validation. I'm still not sure exactly what I was doing wrong with the code I was using: I haven't bothered debugging it, now that I've got other code working.

It is a POST request, not GET.
For now, I'm using their sample code, which uses fsockopen instead of cURL, but it works, which is the main thing.
The request goes to a URL on PayPal which is not reserved for IPN calls: it also exists as an HTML page.
If you do anything wrong in your request, PayPal returns the HTML page instead of an IPN response.

https://www.x.com/message/180364

TRiG 2010-08-13 15:29:10

Would prefer not to accept my own answer, especially as it doesn't actually give much information, but neither of the other answers is accurate.

TRiG 2010-08-13 15:30:13

Answer 3

A:

If you were using CURL, there's a catch - you have to form the POST data block by hand, instead of passing an array. If you pass an array, CURL will send it as multipart data, instead of URL-encoded form, like PayPal expects. I had a very similar issue and got it to work with CURL, eventually. Sample in PHP below:

function deq($s) //Removes the dreaded "magic quotes"
{
    if($s == null)
        return null;
    return
        get_magic_quotes_gpc() ?
        stripslashes($s) : $s;
}

function MakeQS($po) //Makes an URL-encoded query string from an associative array
{
    $ps = "";
    foreach($po as $k => $v)
        $ps .= ($ps == "" ? "" : "&").$k."=".urlencode(deq($v));
    return $ps;
}

$cu = curl_init("https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr");
$po = $_POST;
$po["cmd"] = "_notify-validate";
curl_setopt_array($cu, array(
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER  => true,
    CURLOPT_HEADER => false,
    CURLOPT_POST => 1,
    CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => MakeQS($po)  //This is the non-obvious bit!
    ));
$resp = curl_exec($cu);
if(curl_errno($cu) !== 0)
    //fail...

curl_close($cu);
if($resp != "VERIFIED")
    //fail...

This is working production code.

Seva Alekseyev 2010-08-13 15:36:05

Aha! I've got it working now, and I won't touch it, but if I ever need to poke at it again I'll look into this. Thanks!

TRiG 2010-08-13 15:54:14

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PayPal API Listener Website Payments Standard URI

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