PHP: file_get_contents('php://input') returning string for JSON message

Question

I am trying to read in a JSON message in my PHP app and this is my php code:

$json = file_get_contents('php://input');
$obj = json_decode($json, TRUE);
echo $obj->{'S3URL'};

When I do this I am getting the following error:

Trying to get property of non-object in setImage.php on line 25 (line 25 is the echo $obj->{'S3URL'}; line)

This is the request body of the request to the page:

Request Url: http://localhost:8888/setImage.php
Request Method: POST
Status Code: 200
Params: {
   "S3URL": "http://url.com"
}

This is the request headers:

Accept: application/json
Content-Type: application/json
Connection: keep-alive
Origin: chrome-extension: //rest-console-id
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML,

However, if I instead echo out the $json variable I get the following:

S3URL=http%3A%2F%2Furl.com

So it looks like file_get_contents('php://input'); is reading it in as a string, and not as JSON, which will make parsing it more difficult.

Any idea why it isn't being returned as JSON, or how I can get it to be returned as JSON?

Answer 1

there are two type for executing this type of request

First : you can use it as an stdClassObject for this

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

it will return a object and you can retrieve data from this like

$name = $data->name;

Second : you can use it as an array for this

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

it will return a object and you can retrieve data from this like

$name = $data['name'];

Answer 2

Your use of json_decode is creating an associative array, not an object. You can treat it like an array, instead of an object. If you want an object, use this, instead:

$obj = json_decode($json);

See the documentation on the second parameter to json_decode():

assoc When TRUE, returned objects will be converted into associative arrays.

Also, as Johannes H. pointed out in the comments, the output of echo $json; indicates that you are not actually receiving JSON, in the first place, so you will need to address that, as well. You asked why it isn't JSON; without seeing how you are requesting this script, it's impossible to say for sure.