How to read a PHP Post Variable That’s an Object

It’s easy enough to read in the value of a PHP variable POST variable:

$meetingNumber = $_POST['meetingNumber'];

However I was passing (posting) in an object that had several parameters:

You can’t read in the inner-most value as-is. You also can’t just treat it as an array.

// does not work
$meetingNumber = $_POST['meetingData']['meetingNumber'];

The Solution

The values are being passed in as a JSON object. the trick is to decode the JSON, then extract the value from the array that’s returned:

$meetingData = json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'), true);
$meetingNumber = $meetingData['meetingData']['meetingNumber'];