Manipulating JSON data with PHP - php

Question

Scenario: Playing an online game, have an javascript file that allows me to port data to a PHP on a server using POST/json. I have to enter the path of my server into my client PC for this to work. I am getting a confirmation that connection is fine.
The PHP only recognises source from the website I am playing on, and I can see data transferring to the site in my developer console. The data being POSTed is in the following format:
I can see the data coming in an array looking at the console:
Request URL: //xxxxxx.xxxx/aix/server_api.php Request Method:POST Status Code:200 OK Request Headersview source Accept:application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01 Accept-Charset:ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3 Accept-Encoding:gzip,deflate,sdch Accept-Language:en-GB,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.6 Connection:keep-alive Content-Length:65236 Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8 Host:sd.fast-page.org Origin:http://xx.yyy.com Referer:http://xxx.yyy.com/232/index.aspx User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.22 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/25.0.1364.160 Chrome/25.0.1364.160 Safari/537.22 Form Dataview sourceview URL encoded alliance[id]:118 alliance[name]:DS alliance[members]:12 alliance[score]:982078 data_type:city data[0][id]:12517457 data[0][owner_id]:1538 data[0][owner]:MM1 data[0][coords]:'081:191 data[0][name]:C31 4Chief data[0][score]:11020 data[0][city_type]:castle data[0][location]:land data[1][id]:12517458 data[1][owner_id]:1538 data[1][owner]:MM1 data[1][coords]:'082:191 data[1][name]:C31 5Redrum data[1][score]:10596 data[1][city_type]:castle data[1][location]:water data[2][id]:12386381 data[2][owner_id]:1538 data[2][owner]:MM1 data[2][coords]:'077:189 data[2][name]:C31 1Home data[2][score]:10460 data[2][city_type]:castle data[2][location]:land data[3][id]:12320847 data[3][owner_id]:1538 data[3][owner]:MM1 data[3][coords]:'079:188 data[3][name]:C31 6North data[3][score]:10182 data[3][city_type]:castle data[3][location]:land data[4][id]:12386382 data[4][owner_id]:1538 data[4][owner]:MM1 data[4][coords]:'078:189 data[4][name]:C31 3Back data[4][score]:10108 data[4][city_type]:castle data[4][location]:land data[5][id]:12517453 data[5][owner_id]:1538 data[5][owner]:MM1 data[5][coords]:'077:191 data[5][name]:C31 2Second data[5][score]:9968 data[5][city_type]:castle data[5][location]:land data[6][id]:12714060 data[6][owner_id]:1538 data[6][owner]:MM1 data[6][coords]:'076:194 data[6][name]:C31 MacoHub data[6][score]:9692 data[6][city_type]:castle data[6][location]:land data[7][id]:12517460 data[7][owner_id]:1538 data[7][owner]:MM1 data[7][coords]:'084:191 data[7][name]:C31 Tango data[7][score]:9163 data[7][city_type]:castle data[7][location]:land data[8][id]:12582993 data[8][owner_id]:1538 data[8][owner]:MM1 data[8][coords]:'081:192 data[8][name]:C31 Spring data[8][score]:8864 data[8][city_type]:castle data[8][location]:land data[9][id]:12517454 data[9][owner_id]:1538 data[9][owner]:MM1 data[9][coords]:'078:191 data[9][name]:C31 Pally data[9][score]:8816 data[9][city_type]:castle data[9][location]:land data[10][id]:12779603 data[10][owner_id]:1538
[and so on and so forth.....have masked the rest but this is the format
Response Headersview source Access-Control-Allow-Headers:Content-Type Access-Control-Allow-Methods:POST, GET, OPTIONS Access-Control-Allow-Origin: //xxx.yyy Access-Control-Max-Age:1000 Cache-Control:no-store, must-revalidate, max-age=0, proxy-revalidate, no-transform Connection:keep-alive Content-Encoding:gzip Content-Length:70 Content-Type:application/json Date:Fri, 29 Mar 2013 18:08:14 GMT Expires:Fri, 29 Mar 2013 18:08:14 GMT Pragma:no-cache Server:Apache Vary:Accept-Encoding X-Powered-By:PHP/5.5.0alpha5
Now what I see above is the output to the console on my PC when I trigger the client app.
The PHP is as follows:
$m = false;
if(preg_match('/http\:\/\/game url/',$_SERVER['HTTP_ORIGIN'],$m))
{ $m = $m[1]; }
if(empty($m)) { die('Invalid Origin.'); }
if(!empty($_POST['data_type']))
{
$sender = $_POST['sender'];
$alliance = $_POST['alliance'];
$request = $_POST['data_type'];
$data = $_POST['data'];
// Response to Alliance Info Exporter
$json = array(
'message' => 'recieved.',
'data' => array(),
'error' => false
);
// handle data types
switch($request)
{
case 'connection_test': $json['message'] = 'Welcome to our server. Your are connected!'; break;
case 'member' : /* Code for member request */ break;
case 'city' : /* Code for city request */ break;
case 'support' : /* Code for support request */ break;
default : $json['message'] = 'Nothing Done.'; break;
}
// set headers for API
header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin: '.$_SERVER['HTTP_ORIGIN']);
header('Access-Control-Allow-Methods: POST, GET, OPTIONS');
header('Access-Control-Max-Age: 1000');
header('Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Content-Type');
header('Content-type: application/json');
// Respond
die(json_encode($json));
}
die('No Access.');
I have two or three problems here
I can't seem to manipulate the data that the PHP is getting at all
Whenever I try to add any arguments to the case statement just to even see if I can parse the data somehow then the api stops responding to my client
For example, at the city switch I just tried to output the data to a file just to confirm it was coming through because my browser console gives me a POST success code (http 200)
This is the code I used:
$f = fopen("city.txt", "w");
fwrite($f, $_POST);
fclose($f);
I tried it in the main part of my PHP, tried it at the city case switch (that is the type of query I am executing first), and I tried with other defined types like $data, etc. Nothing writes.
What am I doing wrong?
Secondly my endstate is to post this to a SQL server, how would I do that?