Re: _REQUEST and variable_order

On Wed, 2008-02-06 at 16:39 -0800, Stanislav Malyshev wrote: > Hi! > > This topic was already discussed here but never arrived to a conclusion, > so I will raise it again. > The Problem: > We have $_REQUEST superglobal, which is often used to abstract GET/POST > requests. However, in most cases we do not want GET/POST variables to > mean the same as cookie and environment variables. We can avoid that by > setting variables_order to 'GP' but then we lose _SERVER and _COOKIES > which still can be very much useful. We cannot also reliably use > something like 'CGP' since while it won't allow cookies to override > GET/POST we still have no way of not accepting cookie that has no > matching GET/POST. I think this should be cleaned up so that _REQUEST > behavior would conform its use case. > > The proposal(s): > 1. One way to fix it is to create a new .ini request_order that would > control just _REQUEST. > > 2. Other solution would be to keep variables_order but drop 'C' parsing > from _REQUEST - i.e. make _REQUEST never include cookies. I don't know > how many people really need cookies together with get/post in REQUEST. I like this. $_REQUEST is used by me and most PHP developers I know solely for the purpose of abstracting $_GET and $_POST. But user input never comes directly from cookies (what user fills in a login form by setting cookies?), so I don't see a point of including them. > 3. Yet another solution would be to make superglobals independent of > variables_order - i.e. _COOKIE would always exist even if > variables_order doesn't have the letter. I actually don't see any reason > having JIT to remove any of the superglobals - if you don't use them, > with JIT you don't pay for them. And with COOKIES it's not that it would > be a big cost anyway - how many cookies could you have? > Of course, it'd be more substantial change which could break some apps > relying on some quirks of current behavior. > > So, what do you think on this? > -- > Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect > stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/ > (408)253-8829 MSN: stas@zend.com >