A peer of mine is developing an iPhone application that will allow users to post images on my site via my API. I am building the part of the API that will accept and process the images.
The mobile developer is sending headers like such:
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="photo_1"; filename="photo_1.jpg"
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
When looking for the images sent, is it the same method as with normal HTML forms? Should I look for $_FILES?
Or, using PHP, how would I find his image?
Doesn't appear it's being sent via a form, i.e., <form enctype=multipart/form-data"> and <input type="file">, so the $_FILES array won't be populated.
You'll probably need to read:
$HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA
or do:
$rawPost = file_get_contents("php://input");
From the manual:
php://input allows you to read raw
data from the request body. In case of
POST requests, it preferrable to
$HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA as it does not
depend on special php.ini directives.
Moreover, for those cases where
$HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA is not populated
by default, it is a potentially less
memory intensive alternative to
activating
always_populate_raw_post_data.
php://input is not available with
enctype="multipart/form-data".
For more info, check out:
http://php.net/manual/en/wrappers.php.php
http://php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.httprawpostdata.php
I suppose iOS is sending the whole file as a single block of data in the POSTDATA section of the HTTP request. You can retrieve the whole POSTDATA (not parsed):
<?php
$postdata = file_get_contents("php://input");
?>
$_FILES is meant for reading files sent with enctype="multipart/form-data" in a proper HTML form. iOS is probably sending a plain old POST containing just a bunch of bytes which represent the file.
Tell me if this solves!
See these answers I gave to similar questions (processing uploads from php://input):
- userland multipart/form-data handler and also
- How to validate if uploaded file is an image? [file sent via HTML5's File API, received via php://input]
