View the raw HTTP request body in PHP

I'm currently working on a bug where some Japanese characters are not appearing correctly on the FreeFixer web site. In the process of tracking down the problem I needed to view the raw HTTP request body that FreeFixer sends when posting information about a file or some registry data. In PHP, this can be done by calling the http_get_request_body() function. Unfortunately, this function requires a PECL extension which was unavailable in my current setup. However, this solved the problem:

$request_body = @file_get_contents('php://input');