What are the potential pitfalls of trying to access POST variables after making a cURL request in PHP?

When making a cURL request in PHP, the POST variables are not automatically available in the $_POST superglobal array. To access these variables, you need to retrieve the raw POST data from the cURL response and then parse it into an array using the parse_str function. This will allow you to access the POST variables just like you would with a regular form submission.

// Make cURL request
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://example.com/api');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($postData));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

// Parse raw POST data into an array
parse_str($response, $postVars);

// Access POST variables
echo $postVars['variable1'];
echo $postVars['variable2'];