Passing a URL into a JSON array

Question

I'm attempting to execute a curl statement in PHP that uses a JSON array. I'll post my code below with a little explanation of what im trying to do

function doPost($url, $user, $password, $params) {
  $authentication = 'Authorization: Basic '.base64_encode("$user:$password");
  $http = curl_init($url);
  curl_setopt($http, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
  curl_setopt($http, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
  curl_setopt($http, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
  curl_setopt($http, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
  curl_setopt($http, CURLOPT_POST, true);
  curl_setopt($http, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $params);
  curl_setopt($http, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
        'Content-Type: application/json', $authentication));
  return curl_exec($http);
}

$link = "http://link.it/i.htm?id=55&key=23987gf2389fg";
$phone = '5551231234';
$phone = '1' . $phone;

//Write message
$msg = "Click here " . $link;
$params = '[{"phoneNumber":"'.$phone.'","message":"'.$msg.'"}]';

//Send message
$return = doPost('https://api.link.com','username','password',$params);
echo $return;

Params ends up being

$params = '[{"phoneNumber":"15551231234","message":"Click here http://link.it/i.htm?id=55&key=23987gf2389fg"}]';

All looks good. And the JSON array that is being created by params actually works perfectly if there is no link inside the $msg variable. I am able to execute a successful CURL call. The only time it fails is when I add a link to my $msg variable.

I have contact the support team for the API and they inform me that everything should work on their end.

At this point I am guessing that the link needs to be escaped somehow before it can be written into the JSON array. I have tried escaping the colons and forward slashes with back slashes, but it does not fix the problem. Is there anyone that can shed some light on how to pass a url?

Thank you in advance!!

Answer 1

Don't construct your JSON manually. Construct and array or object then call json_encode() on it.

$params = array();
$object = array("phone"=>$phone, "message"=>$linkMsg);
$params[] = (object) $object;

$param_json_string = json_encode($params);

Then when submitting the JSON via POST with curl, you need to specify the lenght of the string in the header.

curl_setopt($http, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, 
            array( 'Content-Type: application/json', 
                   'Content-Length: '. strlen($param_json_string)));           

Of course, this is in addition to other headers like authentication you're setting (as I see you do in your doPost() method).