How to parse JSON passing in PHP web service - php

Question

I want to pass a JSON: {"name":"jason","age":"20} in PHP though POST
In RoR, I can get the two values by using params["name"] & params["age"]
But I don't know how to get them in PHP.
I understand that I can 'translate' the JSON string into associative array by using json_decode but I don't know how to get the JSON string.
In my PHP code, I has tried something like this:
<?php
$json_string = $_POST['params'];
$json_object= json_decode($json_string);
print_r($json_object);
echo $json_object->name;
echo " ";
echo $json_object->age;
?>
Then I has tested the PHP with terminal and I got the correct result
curl -d 'params={"name":"jason", "age":"20"}' xxxx/test_json_decode.php
It works but it seems strange to me, because I didn't set the 'Content-Type: application/json'
Is it the correct way to parse JSON in PHP?

Answer 1

The content-type is only useful in certain cases, such as jquery doing a standard .post where you haven't explicitly told it to expect a json response. A json string is just text, and the content-type is just a clue to the receiver. but you could still send a json string with image/jpeg and still decode it and get a native structure again.
As long as what you pass into json_decode() is a valid JSON string, regardless of the mime-type it was sent with, it'll be decoded into a native structure.