http - How to access POST data in PHP?

Question

I need to write a PHP page which would accept an XML document sent over a POST request like this:

POST /mypage.php HTTP/1.1
Host: myhost.com
Content-Type: application/xml
Content-Length: ...

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<data>
 ...
</data>

This is not data from some HTML form, just a plain XML document.

How can I access this XML in my PHP code?

Answer 1

Read from php://input. For example, you could use:

$rawdata = file_get_contents('php://input');

or

$rootNode = simplexml_load_file('php://input');

The alternative, using $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA, works, too - but it's slower and needs the PHP configuration always_populate_raw_post_data.