The Request

Introduction#

Symfony’s Request class is an object-oriented representation of the HTTP request. It contains information such as the URL, query string, uploaded files, cookies and other headers coming from the browser.

Syntax#

• $request->getPathInfo(); // returns the path (local part of the URL) that is being requested (but without the query string). I.e. when visiting https://example.com/foo/bar?key=value, this will contain /foo/bar
• $request->query->get(‘id’); // returns a query string parameter ($_GET)
• $request->query->get(‘id’, 1); // returns a query string parameter with a default value
• $request->request->get(‘name’); // returns a request body variable ($_POST)
• $request->files->get(‘attachment’); // returns an instance of UploadedFile identified by “attachment”
• $request->cookies->get(‘PHPSESSID’); // returns the value of a cookie ($_COOKIE)
• $request->headers->get(‘content_type’); // returns an HTTP request header
• $request->getMethod(); // returns the HTTP request method (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.)
• $request->getLanguages(); // returns an array of languages the client accepts

Getting a query string parameter

Lets say we want to build a paginated list of products, where the number of the page is passed as a query string parameter. For instance, to fetch the 3rd page, you’d go to:

https://example.com/products?page=3

The raw HTTP request would look something like this:

GET /products?page=3 HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Accept: text/html
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh)

In order to get the page number from the request object, you can access the query property:

$page = $request->query->get('page'); // 3

In the case of a page parameter, you will probably want to pass a default value in case the query string parameter is not set:

$page = $request->query->get('page', 1);

This means that when someone visits https://example.com/products (note the absence of the query string), the $page variable will contain the default value 1.

Creating a Request object from global variables

PHP exposes a number of so-called global variables which contain information about the HTTP request, such as $_POST, $_GET, $_FILES, $_SESSION, etc. The Request class contains a static createFromGlobals() method in order to instantiate a request object based on these variables:

use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;

$request = Request::createFromGlobals();

When using the Symfony framework, you should not instantiate the request object yourself. Instead, you should use the object that is instantiated when the framework is bootstrapped in app.php / app_dev.php. For instance by type hinting the request object in your controller.

Accessing a POST variable

To get the contents of a form that is submitted with method="post", use the post property:

$name = $request->request->get('name');

Accessing the contents of a cookie

$id = $request->cookies->get('PHPSESSID');

This will return the value of the ‘PHPSESSID’ cookie sent by the browser.