Servage Magazine

Have you ever wondered how you get access to parameters passed to your PHP scripts via a request? Well, it’s fairly simple and PHP provides a range of global variables which are available to you as a developer. Mainly they help you to get access to dynamic information or params.

POST and GET parameters

These params are passed either as part of the URL or posted from a form. You can access them like this:

// Get a param
echo $_POST['param'];
echo $_GET['param'];

// It even works like arrays
echo $_POST['param']['subparam'];

Server paremeters

The $_SERVER global provides various information about the executed script and environment.

// Information from the server
echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];
echo $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'];

Cookies

the $_COOKIE global provides possibilities to store and read cookies from the browser.

// Set and get Cookie data
$_COOKIE['param'] = 'value';
echo $_COOKIE['param'];

There are plenty of more useful PHP globals which you can see here.