Receive Data without $_GET,$_POST AND $_REQUEST

#php

In php there is also method or functionality which can be used to receive data without GET,POST and REQUEST.

Which is

$input_date_from_client = file_get_contents('php://input');

Top comments (10)

Tim Bryan • Aug 10 '18

For context, here is why it works and how it is different from from Post, Get and Request (mainly Post):

The PHP superglobal $_POST, is only supposed to wrap data that is either

application/x-www-form-urlencoded (standard content type for simple form-posts) or
multipart/form-data-encoded (mostly used for file uploads)

This is because these are the only content types that must be supported by user agents.

By contrast, file_get_contents('php://input'); will get all the raw data from the request regardless of its type and is left for you to interpret/parse as you will.

Source with more detials: stackoverflow.com/a/8893792

Sandeep kamboj • Aug 10 '18

Yes. I basically used this to get JSON String.

Mathiu • Aug 10 '18 • Edited

Cool, never heard of this before! 👍

I always try to use either built-in functions/methods from framework I use or filter_input:

$someStringValue = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'someValue', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$someIntValue = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'someValue', FILTER_SANITIZE_NUMBER_INT);
...

robencom • Aug 10 '18

Mathiu, filter_input() and php://input are 2 totally different things:

filter_input() is a function that takes the type of the input along with the variable's name and applies a certain FILTER on it.

php://input is a stream (which is why it is read by file_get_contents()) which allows you to read raw data from the request body.

If you post some 'data' in a text input named 'var' in a form, this is what you will get:
$_POST['var'] will have the value: 'data'
file_get_contents('php://input') will have the value: 'var=data'

FUN fact: php://input is not available with enctype="multipart/form-data"

Mathiu • Aug 11 '18

Thanks for the explanation, I guess there are different use cases for php://input then.

P.S. Now I'm curious what happens when you have the same var name in GET and POST at the same time.

robencom • Aug 11 '18

You will have $_GET['var'] and $_POST['var']. No problems.

$_GET and $_POST are arrays, so you will have no issues for them containing the same variable names.

However, if register_globals was ON (which is removed as of PHP 5.4), then you would look at the variables_order (EGPCS for example). In case it was EGPCS, then Post comes after Get, so the value of $var will be that of $_POST['var'].