Send json array in post request php

In this guide, we are going to show you how to send JSON data in PHP.

In certain cases, you will come across web services and APIs that will require you to send JSON via a POST request.

The easiest way to achieve this is by using PHP’s cURL functions.

Take a look at the following example.

//The URL of the API.
$url = 'http://example.com/api/JSON/create';

//Initiate cURL.
$ch = curl_init($url);

//The JSON data.
$jsonData = array(
    'username' => 'MyUsername',
    'password' => 'MyPassword'
);

//Encode the array into JSON.
$jsonDataEncoded = json_encode($jsonData);

//Tell cURL that we want to send a POST request.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);

//Attach our encoded JSON string to the POST fields.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $jsonDataEncoded);

//Set the content type to application/json
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Type: application/json')); 

//Execute the request
$result = curl_exec($ch);

In the code above, we did the following.

1. We specified the URL that we want to send our JSON to. This is usually the URL of the API that we want to send the data to.
2. After that, we initiated cURL by using the curl_init function.
3. Then, we setup a PHP array containing sample data.
4. We encoded our PHP array into a JSON string by using the function json_encode.
5. We when told cURL that we want to send a POST request by setting the CURLOPT_POST option to 1.
6. After that, we attached our JSON data by using the CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS option.
7. We then set the content-type of our request to application/json using the CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER option. It is extremely important to note that you should always use “application/json”, not “text/json”. Simply put, using “text/json” is incorrect and may lead to errors!
8. Finally, we use the function curl_exec to execute our POST request. If you want to check for errors at this stage, then you should check out our article on error handling with cURL.

As you can see, it’s not much different than sending a regular POST request. In fact, the only real difference is that we set the content type to application/json.

Related: How to retrieve raw JSON POST data with PHP.

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In this article, we will see how to retrieve the JSON POST with PHP, & will also see their implementation through the examples. First, we will look for the below 3 features:

• php://input: This is a read-only stream that allows us to read raw data from the request body. It returns all the raw data after the HTTP headers of the request, regardless of the content type.
• file_get_contents() function: This function in PHP is used to read a file into a string.
• json_decode() function: This function takes a JSON string and converts it into a PHP variable that may be an array or an object.

It is known that all of the post data can be received in a PHP script using the $_POST[] global variable. But this fails in the case when we want to receive JSON string as post data. To receive JSON string we can use the “php://input” along with the function file_get_contents() which helps us receive JSON data as a file and read it into a string. Later, we can use the json_decode() function to decode the JSON string.

Handling JSON POST requests:

// Takes raw data from the request
$json = file_get_contents('php://input');

// Converts it into a PHP object
$data = json_decode($json);

Example 1: This example uses the json_decode() function that is used to decode a JSON string.

PHP

  $json = '["geeks", "for", "geeks"]';

  $data = json_decode($json);

  echo $data[0];

?>

Example 2: This example uses the json_decode() function that is used to decode a JSON string.

PHP

  $json = '{

      "title": "PHP",

      "site": "GeeksforGeeks"

  }';

  $data = json_decode($json);

  echo $data->title;

  echo "\n";

  echo $data->site;

?>

PHP is a server-side scripting language designed specifically for web development. You can learn PHP from the ground up by following this PHP Tutorial and PHP Examples.