Variables
Server configuration and request information—including form parameters and cookies—are accessible in three different ways from your PHP scripts, as described in this section. Collectively, this information is referred to as EGPCS (environment, GET, POST, cookies, and server).
PHP creates six global arrays that contain the EGPCS information.
The global arrays are:
$_COOKIE
Contains any cookie values passed as part of the request, where the keys of the array are the names of the cookies
$_GET
Contains any parameters that are part of a GET request, where the keys of the array are the names of the form parameters
$_POST
Contains any parameters that are part of a POST request, where the keys of the array are the names of the form parameters
$_FILES
Contains information about any uploaded files
$_SERVER
Contains useful information about the web server, as described in the next section
$_ENV
Contains the values of any environment variables, where the keys of the array are the names of the environment variables
These variables are not only global, but are also visible from
within function definitions. The $_REQUEST
array is also created by PHP
automatically. The $_REQUEST
array
contains the elements of the $_GET
,
$_POST
, and $_COOKIE
arrays all in one array variable.
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