php POST array empty upon form submission

Question

I have a custom Content Management System  CMS  I ve built that works perfectly on my dev box  Ubuntu PHP5  MySQL5    I just moved it up to the production box for my client and now all form submissions are showing up as empty   POST arrays  I found a trick to verify the data is actually being passed using file get contents  php   input    and the data is showing up fine there -- the   POST   REQUEST arrays are always empty  I ve also verified the content-type headers are correct as well via firebug  application x-www-form-urlencoded  charset utf-8   This issue is happening regardless of whether a form is submitting via AJAX or a regular form submit  Any help is greatly appreciated

User · Answer

OK  I thought that I should put my case here      I was getting the post array empty in specific cases    The form works well  but some times users complain that they hit submit button  and nothing happens         After digging for a while  I discovered that my hosting company has a security module that checks users inputs and clears the whole post array  not only the malicious data  if it discovers so   In my example  a math teacher was trying to enter the equation  dy   dx   0   0  and data was wiped completely   To fix this  I just advise him now to enter the data in the text area as dy   dx   0   zero  and now it works       This can save someone some time

User · Answer

In my case it was because I was using jQuery to disable all inputs on the page just before using jQuery to submit the form  So I changed my  disable every input even the  hidden  types        input   attr  disabled   disabled       to  disable only the  button  type inputs       input type button    attr  disabled  true     This was so the user couldn t accidentally hit the  go  button twice and hose up our DB  It seems that if you put the  disabled  attribute on a  hidden  type form input their values won t be sent over if the form is submitted

User · Answer

I know this question was about POST via a Form  but came here looking for answers for similar issue when POSTing with JSON content-type  Found the answer and wanted to share it as it cost me much time   When using JSON content-type the   POST array will not populate  only with multi-part forms I believe   Here is what did work to correct the issue    rest json   file get contents  php   input      POST   json decode  rest json  true     hope this helps someone

User · Answer

REFERENCE  http   www openjs com articles ajax xmlhttp using post php  POST method  We are going to make some modifications so POST method will be used when sending the request     var url    get data php   var params    lorem ipsum amp name binny   http open  POST   url  true      Send the proper header information along with the request http setRequestHeader  Content-type    application x-www-form-urlencoded    http setRequestHeader  Content-length   params length   http setRequestHeader  Connection    close     http onreadystatechange   function      Call a function when the state changes    if http readyState    4  amp  amp  http status    200        alert http responseText         http send params     Some http headers must be set along with any POST request  So we set them in these lines     http setRequestHeader  Content-type    application x-www-form-urlencoded    http setRequestHeader  Content-length   params length   http setRequestHeader  Connection    close      With the above lines we are basically saying that the data send is in the format of a form submission  We also give the length of the parameters we are sending   http onreadystatechange   function      Call a function when the state changes    if http readyState    4  amp  amp  http status    200        alert http responseText           We set a handler for the  ready state  change event  This is the same handler we used for the GET method  You can use the http responseText here - insert into a div using innerHTML AHAH   eval it JSON  or anything else   http send params     Finally  we send the parameters with the request  The given url is loaded only after this line is called  In the GET method  the parameter will be a null value  But in the POST method  the data to be send will be send as the argument of the send function  The params variable was declared in the second line as lorem ipsum amp name binny - so we send two parameters -  lorem  and  name  with the values  ipsum  and  binny  respectively

User · Answer

lt form action  test php  method  post  gt                                          Okay  this was stupid and I will be embarassing myself in public  but I knocked up a little test script for something in PHP and when my   POST array was empty  StackOverflow is the first place I looked and I didn t find the answer I needed   I had only written    lt form action  test php  gt    and forgotten to specify the method as being POST   I am sure someone will snigger  but if this helps someone else who does the same thing  then I don t mind  We all do it from time to time

User · Answer

I was getting the following error from Mod Security   Access denied with code 500  phase 2   Pattern match    select grant delete insert drop alter replace truncate update create rename describe    space     A-Z a-z 0-9             space     from into table database index view    space     A-Z a-z 0-9          UNION SELECT            0-9   INTO  FROM   at REQUEST BODY   file   usr local apache conf modsec2 user conf    line  345    id  300013    rev  1    msg  Generic SQL injection protection    severity  CRITICAL     Once I removed my mod security configuration to test  it all worked as expected   Now I just need to modify my rules to stay secure but flexible enough for my needs

User · Answer

In my case  when posting from HTTP to HTTPS  the   POST comes empty  The problem was  that the form had an action like this   example com When I fixed the url to https   example com  the problem disappeared

User · Answer

I know this is old  but wanted to share my solution   In my case the issue was in my  htaccess as I added variables to raise my PHP s max upload limit  My code was like this   php value post max size 50MB php value upload max filesize 50MB   Later I notice that the values should like xxM not xxMB and when I changed it to   php value post max size 50M php value upload max filesize 50M   now my   POST returned the data as normal before  Hope this helps someone in the future

User · Answer

I came across a similar yet slightly different issue and it took 2 days to understand the issue    In my case also POST array was empty  Then checked with file get contents  php   input    and that was also empty    Later I found that browser wasnt asking confirmation for resubmitting form data after If I refresh the page loaded after POST submission  It was directly refreshing page  But when I changed form URL to a different one it was passing POST properly and asked for resubmitting data when attempted to refresh page   Then I checked what is wrong with actual URL   There were no fault with URL  however it was pointing to a folder without index php in URL and I was checking POST at index php   Here I doubted the redirection from   to  index php causes POST data to be lost and tested URL with appending index php to the URL   That Worked   Posted it here so someone would find it helpful

User · Answer

I had a similar problem  Turned out to be a simple fix  In the form I had       lt form action  directory  method  post  gt     where directory was the name of    the directory  My POST array was totally empty  When I looked at the url in my browser  it was displayed with a forward slash on the end    Adding the forward slash to the end of my action did the trick -       lt form action  directory   method  post  gt    My   POST array was full again

User · Answer

I ve found that when posting from HTTP to HTTPS  the   POST comes empty  This happened while testing the form  but took me a while until I realize that

User · Answer

This is sort of similar to what  icesar said   But I was trying to post stuff to my api  located in site api index php  only posting to site api since it gets passed on to index php by itself  This however  apparently cause something to get messed up  as my   POST got emptied on the fly  Simply posting to site api index php directly instead solved it

User · Answer

Having the enable post data reading setting disabled will cause this   According to the documentation   enable post data reading Disabling this option causes   POST and   FILES not to be populated  The only way to read postdata will then be through the php   input stream wrapper  This can be useful to proxy requests or to process the POST data in a memory efficient fashion

User · Answer

same issue here   i was trying to connect to my local server code via post request in postman  and this problem wasted my time alot   for anyone who uses local project  e g  postman   use your IPv4 address  type ipconfig in cmd  instead of the  localhost  keyword  in my case   before   localhost app login   after   192 168 1 101 app login

User · Answer

I had the same problem  The problem was  htaccess  I have a HTTPS rewrite rule and was sending the post requests to http    instead of https     The post request cleared due to redirect

User · Answer

Not the most convenient solution perhaps  but I figured it out that if I set the form action attribute to the root domain  index php can be accessed and gets the posted variables  However if I set a rewritten URL as action  it does not work

User · Answer

Another simple reason for an empty POST array can be caused by not closing a form with  and then adding a second       When the second form is submitted the POST array will be empty

User · Answer

I just spent hours to fix a similar issue  The problem in my case  was the the  max input vars    1000    by default  in the php ini  I had a really huge form without uploads  php ini is set to upload max filesize    100M  and post max size    108M  and it was surely not the issue in my case  PHP behavior is the same for max input vars when it exceeds 1000 variables in the form  It returns and empty  POST array  I wish I could have found that one hours  and hours ago

User · Answer

I could solve the problem using enctype  application x-www-form-urlencoded  as the default is  text plain   When you check in  DATA the seperator is a space for  text plain  and a special character for the  urlencoded     Kind regards Frank

User · Answer

My problem was that I was using the HTML  lt base gt  tag to change the base URL of my test site  Once I removed that tag from the header  the   POST data came back

User · Answer

In my case  php page on OVH mutualis   server  enctype  text plain  does not work    POST and corresponding   REQUEST is empty   the other examples below work      lt form action     method  post  gt   lt  -- in this case  my google chrome 45 0 2454 101 uses -- gt   lt  --     Content-Type application x-www-form-urlencoded -- gt       lt input name  say  value  Hi  gt       lt button gt Send my greetings lt  button gt   lt  form gt    lt form action     method  post  enctype  application x-www-form-urlencoded  gt       lt input name  say  value  Hi  gt       lt button gt Send my application x-www-form-urlencoded greetings lt  button gt   lt  form gt    lt form action     method  post   enctype  multipart form-data  gt       lt input name  say  value  Hi  gt       lt button gt Send my multipart form-data greetings lt  button gt   lt  form gt    lt form action     method  post  enctype  text plain  gt  lt  -- not working -- gt       lt input name  say  value  Hi  gt       lt button gt Send my text plain greetings lt  button gt   lt  form gt       More here  method  quot post quot  enctype  quot text plain quot  are not compatible

User · Answer

If you are posting to a index php file in a directory for example  api index php make sure in your form you specify the full directory to the file e g  This    lt form method  post  action   api index php  gt    lt  form gt    OR   lt form method  post  action   api   gt    lt  form gt    works  But this fails   lt form method  post  action   api  gt    lt  form gt

User · Answer

Make sure that the name property of each field is defined   This create you an empty POST on PHP   lt input type  text  id  Phone  gt    But  this will work   lt input type  text  name  Phone  id  Phone  gt

User · Answer

In addition to MRMage s post   I had to set this variable to solve the problem that some   POST variables  with an large array   1000 items  disappeared   suhosin request max vars   2500    request   not  post  was the solution

User · Answer

Make sure you use name  your variable name  in input tag   I mistakenly use id  your variable name    I spent much time to catch the bug

User · Answer

Here s another possible cause -- my form was submitting to domain com without the WWW  and I had set up an automatic redirect to add the  WWW   The   POST array was getting emptied in the process   So to fix it all I had to do was submit to www domain com

User · Answer

Don t have an elegant solution at this point but wanted to share my findings for the future reference of others who encounter this problem  The source of the problem was 2 overriden php values in an  htaccess file  I had simply added these 2 values to increase the filesize limit for file uploads from the default 8MB to something larger -- I observed that simply having these 2 values in the htaccess file at all  whether larger or smaller than the default  caused the issue   php value post max size xxMB php value upload max filesize xxMB   I added additional variables to hopefully raise the limits for all the suhosin post xxx suhosin upload xxx vars but these didn t have any effect with this problem unfortunately    In summary  I can t really explain the  why  here  but have identified the root cause  My feeling is that this is ultimately a suhosin htaccess issue  but unfortunately one that I wasn t able to resolve other than to remove the 2 php overridden values above    Hope this helps someone in the future as I killed a handful of hours figuring this out  Thanks to all who took the time to help me with this  MrMage  Andrew

User · Answer

Make sure that  in php ini    track vars  it s only available on very old PHP versions  is set to On variables order contains the letter P post max size is set to a reasonable value  e g  8 MB   if using suhosin patch  suhosin post max vars and suhosin request max vars are large enough    I suppose the second suggestion of mine will solve your problem

User · Answer

For me   htaccess was redirecting when mod rewrite wasn t installed   Install mod rewite and all is fine   Specifically    lt IfModule  mod rewrite c gt    ErrorDocument 404  index php  lt  Ifmodule gt    was executing

[php] php $_POST array empty upon form submission

Examples related to php

Examples related to arrays

Examples related to forms

Examples related to post