Question

I’m building my first REST Api and it’s going well so far, i’m just having an issue with files uploads via PUT request method. I need to be PUT because i’m updating a user and their avatar image from an iOS app, and PUT is specifically for update requests.

So when I PUT and file upload, the $_FILES array is actually empty, but when I print the PUT data

parse_str(file_get_contents('php://input'), $put_vars);  
$data = $put_vars; 
print_r($data);

I get the following response;

Array
(
    [------WebKitFormBoundarykwXBOhO69MmTfs61
Content-Disposition:_form-data;_name] => \"avatar\"; filename=\"avatar-filename.png\"
Content-Type: image/png

�PNG


)

Now I don’t really understand this PUT data because I can’t just access it like an array or anything. So my question is how do I access the uploaded file from the PUT data?

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

PHP provides support for the HTTP PUT method used by some clients to store files on a server. PUT requests are much simpler than a file upload using POST requests and they look something like this:

PUT /path/filename.html HTTP/1.1

The following code is in the official PHP documentation for uploading files via PUT:

<?php
/* PUT data comes in on the stdin stream */
$putdata = fopen("php://input", "r");

/* Open a file for writing */
$fp = fopen("myputfile.ext", "w");

/* Read the data 1 KB at a time
   and write to the file */
while ($data = fread($putdata, 1024))
  fwrite($fp, $data);

/* Close the streams */
fclose($fp);
fclose($putdata);
?>