Posting data to sever using PHP and cURL - php

Question

I have the following data to be posted to server via my API.
Request Body:
{
"nutrients": {
"protein": "beans",
"fats": "oil",
"carbohdrate": "starch"
}
}
Each time I run the script, am getting the following error below
{"errors":[{"status":"400","code":"031","title":"payload not parseable","detail":"Invalid formatting of the request payload."},{"status":"400","code":"026","title":"payload missing","detail":"No payload describing the resource object included in the request."}]}
It seems that it's because am not adding the variable "nutrients" in the data array to be posted.
Can someone help me out. Below is my effort so far. Thanks
<?php
$url = "https://myapi_site.com/server/";
$data = array(
'protein' => 'beans',
'fats' => 'oil',
'carbohdrate' => 'starch'
);
$curl = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER,
array("Content-type: application/json"));
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
$json_response = curl_exec($curl);
$status = curl_getinfo($curl, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
curl_close($curl);
$response = json_decode($json_response, true);
?>

Answer 1

You are posting a PHP array which hasn't been converted to JSON... you want to post the JSON itself. Here is how you can post the JSON string.
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, json_encode($data));
You can use json_encode to encode the PHP array to JSON:
http://php.net/json_encode
Define your $data variable like so:
$data = array(
'nutrients' => array(
'protein' => 'beans',
'fats' => 'oil',
'carbohdrate' => 'starch',
),
);
You can echo $data variable to see that it contains the right JSON data:
echo $data;