Reading from Standard Input in PHP

You want to read from standard input in a command-line context—for example, to get user input from the keyboard or data piped to your PHP program.

Use fopen() to open php://stdin:

$fh = fopen('php://stdin','r') or die($php_errormsg);
while($s = fgets($fh)) {
   print "You typed: $s";
}

$fh = fopen('php://stdin','r') or die($php_errormsg);

while($s = fgets($fh)) {

print "You typed: $s";

}

Reading data from standard input isn’t very useful in a web context, because information doesn’t arrive via standard input.

The bodies of HTTP POST and fileupload requests are parsed by PHP and put into special variables.

Non–file-upload POST request bodies can also be read with the php://input stream.