How to post JSON to an API endpoint? - api

Question

I am using Hertz Api Reservation vehicle lookup service to get a list of vehicles with provided itinerary information. The documentation to this specific service can be found here
NOTE: They require you to have an access token to access their developer docs but you can easily get one by just filling out the form. Alternatively, you can just use the one I have below().
Here is the code that I used
$action_uri = 'https://www.hertz.co.nz/rentacar/rest/home/form';
$post_fields = array(
'accessToken' => '1616634772671643728-8915933508415978751',
'ageSelector' => '21',
'continueButton' => 'continue',
'dropoffDay' => '6/6/2013',
'dropoffTime' => '9:00',
'pickupDay' => '5/6/2013',
'pickupHiddenEOAG' => 'AKLT50',
'pickupLocation' => 'Auckland Airport',
'pickupTime' => '09:00'
);
$data_string = json_encode($post_fields);
$ch = curl_init($action_uri);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 300);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, dirname(__FILE__) . '/Cookiejar.txt');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, dirname(__FILE__) . '/Cookiejar.txt');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data_string);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
'Content-Type: application/json',
'Content-Length: ' . strlen($data_string)
));
$content = curl_exec($ch);
$headers = curl_getinfo($ch);
$error_number = curl_errno($ch);
$error_message = curl_error($ch);
curl_close($ch);
print_r($content);
var_dump($headers);
var_dump($error_number);
var_dump($error_message);
According to their documentation, I need to submit the POST parameters in JSON format. Because of that, I set CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER to what you see above.
My problem is that I am getting garbled data from $content like this
‹Eͱ‚0৸t щÕÉÅã`B8¤±´M[ ðº]¿Þýÿƒ¶î"Er˜½üÌ¿Iø ‡M{#µÎi›S:ŽcÒ¢qSR©DNÔ t¬bÆÍÀW’¶ªÃïý–zV5ú˜Sšz]ÂéÐZöÂÿÖK±Š·¯Þq¯áÁ;„´#f|'`00ÁkÐûŽ;Åõþ̲cIÖ„2´EË¥Åpó
This is the output of $headers
array
'url' => string 'https://www.hertz.co.nz/rentacar/rest/home/form' (length=47)
'content_type' => string 'application/json' (length=16)
'http_code' => int 400
'header_size' => int 479
'request_size' => int 694
'filetime' => int -1
'ssl_verify_result' => int 20
'redirect_count' => int 0
'total_time' => float 1.078
'namelookup_time' => float 0
'connect_time' => float 0.25
'pretransfer_time' => float 0.75
'size_upload' => float 261
'size_download' => float 187
'speed_download' => float 173
'speed_upload' => float 242
'download_content_length' => float -1
'upload_content_length' => float 0
'starttransfer_time' => float 1.078
'redirect_time' => float 0
'certinfo' =>
array
empty
As you can see, I got http_code 400 which is a Bad Request.
Any idea why this is? Am I doing the posting of a JSON variable to an API right?

Answer 1

It`s gziped answer. Add CURLOPT_ENCODING
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, '');

Answer 2

I think these are old links now as I can't hertz documentation at these links