PHP cURL PUT request where data is array - php

Question

I've got a cURL request that works from the command line, but I can't figure out how to translate it into the PHP implementation of cURL. I believe that my issue is with the formatting of the data that's being sent, but I'm not 100% sure that is the case. This is the curl command I want to send:
# curl -X PUT -d '{"shared_link": {"access":"open"}}' \
-H "Authorization: Bearer ACCESSCODE" https://api.example.com/files/12345
I know that command works! So here's how I'm trying to reproduce it in PHP (where I have a variety of other curl commands working, but none quite like this).
$url = 'https://api.example.com/files/1234';
$header = array('Authorization: Bearer ACCESSCODE');
$data = array('shared_link'=>array('access'=>'open'));
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST,'PUT');
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$data);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER,$header);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $output;
What I expect to get (and what I do get, when running the command from the command line) is a JSON response from the API server containing all the info about the file, including a change to the 'shared_link' value. What I get instead is a JSON response containing all the info about the file, with the 'shared_link' value unchanged. This is identical to if I were sending a GET request, or a PUT request where the format of the data was valid, but which didn't match any of the file's fields that were possible to update.
So I don't know if the problem with my request is the format of the data (this is what I think is the most likely) or whether I'm correctly configuring curl to do a PUT. I believe I'm doing that the way I've seen it described in a number of other examples, but it still seems a bit strange to me, so I can't be totally sure I'm doing it correctly. In addition, there could be some other area where I'm making a mistake that I don't recognize!
I've tried a number of different ways of formatting the data, none of which worked for me, including:
// This fails with 400 bad request
$data = http_build_query(array('shared_link'=>array('access'=>'open')));
// So does this
$data = urlencode("shared_link[access]=open");
// This fails because the JSON gets converted into objects,
// which POSTFIELDS won't accept
$data = json_decode('{"shared_link": {"access":"open"}}');
I'm running out of things to try. Can someone help me figure out what I'm doing wrong? And if there's any relevant information that I've left out, just let me know and I'll be happy to provide it.
Thanks in advance.
EDIT:
So the answer, it turns out, was so obvious that I overlooked it!
All I had to do was:
$data = '{"shared_link": {"access": "open"}}'
So yeah, question answered. Thanks CBroe!
In my (sort of) defense, the documentation for CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS (http://php.net/manual/en/function.curl-setopt.php) says that the value for that option has to be either an array or a urlencoded string, which is what I was going on. So I was working under that assumption, which was clearly mistaken, since what worked is definitely neither an array nor a urlencoded string.

Answer 1

You can try this
$post_body = http_build_query(
array(
'shared_link[access]' => 'open'
)
);
After that, pass curl opt as curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, urldecode($post_body));