[thelist] Retrieving Post data

[Jay Blanchard]

[snip]
Suppose a user agent sends the following HTTP post request:

<!-- start (not part of HTTP message)
POST /listener.php HTTP/1.0
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=iso_8859-1
Accept: text/xml
Accept-Charset: utf-8, iso_8859-1
Content-Length: 190

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<XML_DATA>
  <Fields>
    <ID type="CHAR">abcde</ID>
    <NAME type="CHAR">Test Data</NAME>
    <EFFDATE type="DATE">01/01/2005</EFFDATE>
  </Fields>
</XML_DATA>
end -->

How do I read the embedded xml data in PHP? I tried looking at
$_REQUEST and it's not there.
[/snip]

You need to RTFM about XML and PHP http://www.php.net/xml as well as
understanding the various external variables, such as POST
http://us4.php.net/variables.external. The illustration that you provide
does not have the XML contained in any of the $_REQUEST variables, so
you really do not have access to it.

Typically XML data is read from a file and then parsed. You can also
read XML data via a socket http://us4.php.net/manual/en/ref.sockets.php

If you wanted to you could place all of the XML data in a variable in
the POSTing entity, like this...

$xmlVariable = "<?xml version=\"1.0\"?>
<XML_DATA>
  <Fields>
    <ID type="CHAR">abcde</ID>
    <NAME type="CHAR">Test Data</NAME>
    <EFFDATE type="DATE">01/01/2005</EFFDATE>
  </Fields>
</XML_DATA>";

Send the post to the receveing entity and ...

echo $_POST['xmlVariable'];

But that is highly inefficient and may cause you other problems.