Table of Contents
JSON is the most popular data format on the web because it is natively supported in JavaScript and human-readable.
As such, many APIs support the ability to send and receive JSON data.
In this tutorial, we will learn how to send JSON data to a URL using cURL in PHP.
Sending JSON Data to a URL
To send JSON data to a URL, first let's define the array we want to send:
PHP$data = [
'name' => 'John Doe',
'age' => 30
];
Now let's encode the array as JSON:
PHP$json = json_encode($data);
Not that we have our JSON, let's initialize a cURL request:
PHP$ch = curl_init();
Now let's apply a few options:
PHPcurl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://example.com/api');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $json);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, [
'Content-Type: application/json',
'Content-Length: ' . strlen($json)
]);
Finally, let's execute the request:
PHP$output = curl_exec($ch);
Now, we can close the cURL request:
PHPcurl_close($ch);
Taken all together, we can write a reusable function for this:
PHP$data = [
'name' => 'John Doe',
'age' => 30
];
function post_json($url, $data) {
$json = json_encode($data);
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $json);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, [
'Content-Type: application/json',
'Content-Length: ' . strlen($json)
]);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $output;
}
$output = post_json('https://example.com/api', $data);
echo $output;
Conclusion
In this post, we learned how to send JSON data to a URL using cURL in PHP.
Simply initialize a new cURL request, apply a few options, and execute the request with the given url and data.
Thanks for reading!
Then, we can close the cURL request and return the output.
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