Integration Guide

Getting Started With the PayPal Name-Value Pair API
Creating an NVP Request
A
82 April 2012 PayPal Payments Pro Integration Guide
To enable PayPal to authenticate your request:
1. Specify the API username associated with your account.
USER=
API_username
2. Specify the password associated with the API username.
PWD=
API_password
3. If you are using an API signature and not an API certificate, specify the API signature
associated with the API username.
SIGNATURE=
API_signature
4. Optionally, you can specify the email address on file with PayPal of the third-party
merchant on whose behalf you are calling the API operation.
SUBJECT=
merchantEmailAddress
NOTE: Typically, a merchant grants third-party permissions to a shopping cart. The merchant
previously must have given you permission to execute the API operation.
Specifying Credentials Using cURL
The following example shows one way to specify a signature using cURL:
curl --insecure https://api-3t.sandbox.paypal.com/nvp -d ^
"METHOD=name^
&VERSION=XX.0^
&USER=API_username^
&PWD=API_password^
&SIGNATURE=API_signature^
&..."
NOTE: This example does not establish a secure connection and should not be used live on
paypal.com.
URL Encoding
All requests to execute PayPal API operations sent using HTTP must be URL-encoded. The
encoding ensures that you can transmit special characters, characters that are not allowed in a
URL, and characters that have special meaning in a URL, such as the equal sign and
ampersand.
The PayPal NVP API uses the HTTP protocol to send requests and receive responses from a
PayPal API server. You must encode all data sent using the HTTP protocol because data that is
not encoded could be misinterpreted as part of the HTTP protocol instead of part of the
request. Most programming languages provide a way to encode strings in this way. You