PHP - $_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

<!DOCTYPE html>
<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 the action attribute of the <form> tag.

In the action file we can use the $_REQUEST variable to 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.

HTML form

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>

<form method="post" action="/tutorials/php/php-request.php">
  Name: <input type="text" name="fname">
  <input type="submit">
</form>

<?php
if ($_SERVER["REQUEST_METHOD"] == "POST") {
    // collect value of input field
    $name = htmlspecialchars($_REQUEST['fname']);
    if (empty($name)) {
        echo "Name is empty";
    } else {
        echo $name;
    }
}
?>

</body>
</html>

Output

Name:"--------"submit

• Using $_REQUEST on $_GET Requests

GET request can be form submissions as in the example above, with the method attribute of the HTML <form> element set to GET.

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

</body>
</html>

When a user clicks the link, the query string data is sent to demo_phpfile.php.