Question

I’m working on sending an email from my site using a JSON. I’m doing it this way because simply sending it through the <form> control seems to bypass a little DIY “Are you human” validation I’m doing:

<script type="text/javascript">
    $("#contact-submit").click(function() {
        if ($("#contact-captcha").text != "green") {
            $("#contact-captcha").text = "Incorrect";
            $("#contact-captcha").css("border-color", "#7c0707");
        }
        else
        {
            sendMail();
        }
    });

    function sendMail() {
        $.ajax({
            type: "POST",
            url: 'includes/contact.php',
            data: { to: '[e-mail]', from: $('#contact-email').text(), subject: $('#contact-subject').val(), message: $('#contact-message').val() }
        });
    }
</script>

The problem is now I can’t figure out how to read the JSON data on contact.php.

I’ve seen tutorials that define the JSON in the php code and then use json_decode() to read it which is no good as I can’t be defining the JSON there.

Can anyone provide any guidance as to how to read the JSON here? I thought of using a querystring but can’t figure out how to do that here.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

When using

data: { to: '[e-mail]', from: $('#contact-email').text(), subject: $('#contact-subject').val(), message: $('#contact-message').val() }

You’ll get the data in $_POST['to'], $_POST['from'], etc.

A better way (still not a JSON method), would be to use something like this:

var serialized = $("form").serialize();
serialized.to = "[e-mail]";
$.ajax { ... data: serialized ... }

and have from, subject, and message be the name attributes of the input fields.

From: <input type="text" name="from"/>

If you DO want to send JSON (I don’t see any reason to do it), you can do this:

json = JSON.stringify({ to: '[e-mail]', from: $('#contact-email').text(), subject: $('#contact-subject').val(), message: $('#contact-message').val() });

and send it using data: { json: json }, and finally do

json_decode($_POST['json']);

to get the associative array back.