dejan7/httpquest

PHP polyfill for HTTP request parsing

, _(*1)

HTTPQuest

HTTPQuest is a lightweight PHP polyfill that can parse incoming request body for any HTTP verb., _(*2)

The problem:

PHP by default parses request data only for GET and POST requests and puts them in well-known $_GET and $_POST and $_FILES variables. Additionally it does so only for multipart/form-data and application/x-www-form-urlencoded enctypes (Content-type HTTP header)., _(*3)

So if you are trying to build a REST API in plain PHP (without a framework) which utilizes other HTTP verbs like PUT or PATCH - it turns out to be a pain. This package attempts to solve that by doing the boring parsing for you and making the request data available for any type of request as well., _(*4)

How to install?

composer require dejan7/httpquest:0.3.0, _(*5)

How to use?

Instantiate the class and call the decode method somewhere near the beginning of your app (e.g. during bootstrapping)., _(*6)

$HTTPQuest = new \HTTPQuest\HTTPQuest();
$HTTPQuest->decode($_POST, $_FILES);

And that's all, your parsed data will now be in variables that you passed to the decode method ($_POST, and $_FILES in this case)., _(*7)

PHP puts stuff in $_POST and $_FILES by default for following cases:, _(*8)

• POST : Content-types:
  • application/x-www-form-urlencoded
  • multipart/form-data

HTTPQuest enhances this and you can configure it to parse data for any method/content-type combination. The default options are set to this:, _(*9)

• POST: Content-types:
  • application/json
• PUT: Content-types:
  • application/x-www-form-urlencoded
  • multipart/form-data
  • application/json
• PATCH: Content-types:
  • application/x-www-form-urlencoded
  • multipart/form-data
  • application/json

However, you can change the defaults by passing a HTTPQuestOptions instance to the constructor like this:, _(*10)

include __DIR__ . "/../vendor/autoload.php";

use HTTPQuest\HTTPQuestOptions;
use HTTPQuest\Requests;
use HTTPQuest\ContentTypes;


$opts = new HTTPQuestOptions();

$opts->forMethod(Requests::GET)
    ->parse(ContentTypes::X_WWW_FORM_URLENCODED);

$opts->forMethod(Requests::PATCH)
    ->parse(ContentTypes::FORMDATA)
    ->parse(ContentTypes::JSON);

$HTTPQuest = new \HTTPQuest\HTTPQuest(
    $_SERVER,
    "php://input",
    $opts
);

Wait! Are you telling me that it can parse request body even for GET requests? That's correct. Now whether you will utilize such scenarios - i leave the choice to you. You can read some of the discussions on StackOverflow and decide for yourself http://stackoverflow.com/questions/978061/http-get-with-request-body http://stackoverflow.com/questions/299628/is-an-entity-body-allowed-for-an-http-delete-request, _(*11)

Files

HTTPQuest also parses the files from incoming requests and tries it's best to mimic PHP's default behavior with $_FILES. However, the only caveat is that you can't use move_uploaded_file PHP function on requests other than POST. On other requests move_uploaded_file thinks that the file wasn't uploaded with PHP and it doesn't execute. The workaround is to use copy like this:, _(*12)

$HTTPQuest = new \HTTPQuest\HTTPQuest();
$HTTPQuest->decode($_POST, $_FILES);

copy($_FILES["myfile"]["tmp_name"], "/some/dir" . $_FILES["myfile"]["name"]);

Credits

Russel for sndsgd/http, HTTPQuest uses his multipart/form-data decoding logic., _(*13)

License

This is an open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license., _(*14)