What does a JSON-encoded request look like?

Question

I'm building an API using PHP.

What do I need to do to recognize a JSON encoded request?

Does it come with a certain request type?

How do I get just the request body so that I can json_decode it?

Answer 1

RFC 4627 recommends the mime type application/json. You can read the request data with php://input .

Answer 2

The mime type for json is application/json , but I doubt that has caught on yet to add that to responses.

The easiest way to spot a json response is that it will most likely be wrapped in curly braces and have colons after each member. But that still isn't a sure fire way to know it's json.

The easiest way to test it from PHP is to try to json_decode it, if it throws an error, either it's not json, or it's not well-formed json and thus you won't be able to use it anyway.