How do I get the HTTP request body in MY language?

From The Socknet

The specification calls for the request body to contain nothing but a JSON object. This is unlike a "regular" POST call from a web page form, so it cannot be accessed by Perl's CGI::param or PHP's $_POST, for example.

The following examples show how to get the entire raw post data (first checking that the data was in fact POSTed and is reportedly application/json) in a few sample languages/libraries:

Contents 1 Perl's CGI.pm 2 Perl's Catalyst 3 PHP 4 Java 5 See Also

Perl's CGI.pm

$q = new CGI();
die 'Not a POST' unless $q->request_method eq 'POST';
die 'Not JSON' unless $ENV{CONTENT_TYPE} eq 'application/json';
$json_data = $q->param('POSTDATA');

Perl's Catalyst

Where $c is the context object.

die 'Not a POST' unless $c->request->method eq 'POST';
die 'Not JSON' unless $c->request->content_type eq 'application/json';
$json_data = $c->request->body;
$json_data = <$json_data> if ref $json_data;

PHP

if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] != 'POST')
    die('Not a POST');
if ($_SERVER['CONTENT_TYPE'] != 'application/json')
    die('Not JSON');
$json_data = file_get_contents('php://input');

Java

...
public void doPost(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
throws ServletException, IOException, IllegalStateException
{
    if (! request.getContentType().equals("application/json"))
        throw new IOException("Not JSON");
    BufferedReader reader = request.getReader();
    char[] characters = new char[request.getContentLength()];
    reader.read(characters, 0, request.getContentLength());
    String json_data = new String(characters);
    ...
}
...

None of the above examples has been tested. Feel free to add more untested examples in other languages/libraries.

Also of note is that the result of all the examples is a string which may or may not actually be JSON. Now's the time to pass that into your JSON library's parse() function and find out if it works.

See Also

• Functions