datatables serverside html entity in post data

Question

I'm writing a server side application for the jquery plugin DataTables, since it's not working I simplified my implementation. This is the js part:

$('#foo').DataTable({
 "processing": true,
 "serverSide": true,
 "ajax": {
    "url": uri_api,
    "method": "POST",
    "data": function(d) {
       d.arguments="get_foo"
    }
 },
"columns": [
  { "data": "ONE" },
  { "data": "TWO" },
  { "data": "THREE" }
 ]
});

And this is my api.php:

<?php
header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *");
$data = json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'), TRUE);
set_error_handler("error_handler", E_ALL);
if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] === 'OPTIONS') {http_response_code(200);exit();}
var_dump($data);
var_dump(file_get_contents('php://input'));
var_dump(json_last_error_msg());
die();

As you can see it's a very basic try, this is my real anser of api.php:

NULL
string(12259) 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string(12) "Syntax error"

I don't know why is formatted like this, it looks having html entities, "%5B" should be "[". I don't know to convert and the php function are not working. I have used yet datatables before, and never noticed this. If I just do var_dump($_POST) I see the right structure, but why php://input doesn't work?

EDIT: just to develop i'm using windows 10, xampp php 8.0.2 and webpack without a main web server. I'm just browsing the page result of npm run build with Chrome.

EDIT2: I solved with parse_str in this way

if (JSON_ERROR_NONE !== json_last_error()) {
  parse_str($datajson,$data);
}

My question is kept, I would like solve without parse_str.

Answer 1

Ok I finally solved with json data. https://datatables.net/forums/discussion/26282/posting-json-with-built-in-ajax-functionality Based on the link above I modified my js in this way:

$('#foo').DataTable({
 "processing": true,
 "serverSide": true,
 "ajax": {
    "url": uri_api,
    "method": "POST",
    "data": function(d) {
        return JSON.stringify($.extend(d, { "arguments" : "get_foo"}));
    }
 },
"columns": [
  { "data": "ONE" },
  { "data": "TWO" },
  { "data": "THREE" }
 ]
});

I didn't figure out that default data type were not json, in my previous implementation I used another js library instead of datatables, I used tabulator. Since I got experience with datatables I choose this library for this new project which will be develop with webpack, and in my previous datatables implementation I really was not using a backend like now with api and a proper instance but just standalone ad hoc scripts and the script I was using for the serverside pagination of datatables was written with $_POST input, not json as I thought. I forgot this detail. Whereas tabulator was using natively the json data. Well, thank you very much. Regards.