plain HTTP POST in PHP

Hi, If I POST a file to a PHP script, using the multipart/form-data option, I can specify the name of the file which will be transformed into a PHP variable and I can do whatever I want with the file contents. Now if I do a plain POST, i.e. no multipart/form-data, but e.g. Content-Type: text/xml and then the plain contents, how can I access the POSTed data from PHP ? If I use CGI, I can grab the POSTed data from stdin, but I haven't found anything like that in PHP. Thanks, Kees P.S. I'm not a member of the list, so please reply to me personally.