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phphttppostget
Nic Wortel
Nic Wortel

Reputation: 11423

Are PHP's $_GET and $_POST tied to the HTTP GET and POST methods, respectively?

I noticed that I can use $_GET inside a POST request, why is that possible?

HTML form:

<form method="POST" action="test.php?id=123">
  <input type="text" name="foo">
  <input type="submit">
</form>

test.php:

<?php
var_dump($_GET, $_POST);

Output:

array (size=1)
  'id' => string '123' (length=3)

array (size=1)
  'foo' => string 'bar' (length=3)

Upvotes: 0

Views: 93

Answers (1)

Nic Wortel
Nic Wortel

Reputation: 11423

In contrary to what is suggested by their names, $_GET and $_POST are not tied to the GET and POST methods of the HTTP specification.

The query string (which is represented as an associative array in PHP's $_GET variable) can be part of any URL, wether you are doing a GET, POST, PUT or any other method on that URL. Although query strings are most commonly used with GET methods, they are certainly not limited to them. So, when POSTing a form to a URL that contains a query string (as per the example), the keys and values of the query string will be available in the $_GET variable.

$_QUERY_STRING would probably have been a better name for this variable.

It works slightly different the other way around. Although the POST method is not the only one that can contain a body (for instance, a PUT request can as well), some testing reveals that $_POST only contains data in case of a POST request - it is empty in all other cases.

PHP does not have a $_PUT variable to use with PUT request, probably because browsers only support GET and POST requests for form submission. Instead, you can use file_get_contents("php://input") to read from the incoming stream to PHP, and then use str_parse() to load the keys and values as an associative array:

parse_str(file_get_contents("php://input"), $data);

Upvotes: 1

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