PHP - $_REQUEST
$_REQUEST
$_REQUEST is a PHP super global variable which contains submitted form data, and all cookie data.
In other words,$_REQUEST is an array containing data from$_GET,$_POST, and$_COOKIE.
You can access this data with the$_REQUEST keyword followed by the name of the form field, or cookie, like this:
$_REQUEST['firstname']Using $_REQUEST on $_POST Requests
POST request are usually data submitted from an HTML form.
Here is an example of how a HTML form could look like:
HTML form
<html><body><form method="post" action="demo_request.php"> Name: <input type="text" name="fname"> <input type="submit"></form></body></html>When a user clicks the submit button, the form data is sent to a PHP file specified in theaction attribute of the<form> tag.
In the action file we can use the$_REQUEST variableto collect the value of the input field.
PHP file
$name = $_REQUEST['fname'];echo $name;In the example below we have put the HTML form and PHP code in the same PHP file.
We have also added some extra lines for security.
Example
<html><body><form method="post" action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];?>"> Name: <input type="text" name="fname"> <input type="submit"></form><?phpif ($_SERVER["REQUEST_METHOD"] == "POST") { $name = htmlspecialchars($_REQUEST['fname']); if (empty($name)) { echo "Name is empty"; } else { echo $name; }}?></body></html>Using $_REQUEST on $_GET Requests
GET request can be form submissions as in the example above, with themethod attribute of the HTML<form>element set toGET.
GET requests can also be data from a query string (information added after a URL address).
Here is an example of how an HTML hyperlink, with a query string could look like:
HTML link
<html><body><a href="demo_phpfile.php?subject=PHP&web=W3schools.com">Test $GET</a></body></html>When a user clicks the link, the query string data is sent todemo_phpfile.php.
In the PHP file we can use the$_REQUEST variableto collect the value of the query string.
Example
The PHP filedemo_phpfile.php:
<html><body><?phpecho "Study " . $_REQUEST['subject'] . " at " . $_REQUEST['web'];?></body></html>
