PHP Curl Send JSON Data - php

Question

I am following this tutorial:
https://lornajane.net/posts/2011/posting-json-data-with-php-curl
what I am trying to do is POST JSON Data through CURL
$url = "http://localhost/test/test1.php";
$data = array("name" => "Hagrid", "age" => "36");
$data_string = json_encode($data);
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data_string);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER,array("Content-type: application/json", "Content-Length: " . strlen($data_string)));
$result = curl_exec($ch);
var_dump($result);
when I POST plain text data , I am able to receive that, but when I try through JSON , I am not able to receive that.
Here is my test1.php
test1.php
print_r($_POST);
print_r($_POST);
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks

Answer 1

When you POST JSON Data through cURL, you have to use php://input. You can use it like:
// get the raw POST data
$rawData = file_get_contents("php://input");
// this returns null if not valid json
return json_decode($rawData, true); // will return array
php://input is a read-only stream that allows you to read raw data
from the request body
The PHP superglobal $_POST, only is supposed to wrap data that is either
application/x-www-form-urlencoded (standard content type for simple form-posts) or
multipart/form-data-encoded (mostly used for file uploads)
The content would now be application/json (or at least none of the above mentioned), so PHP's $_POST -wrapper doesn't know how to handle that (yet).
Reference

Answer 2

JSON data does not come through in $_POST. You need to use file_get_contents('php://input');
You will also need to json_decode it.
$json = json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'));
var_dump($json);