NYCPHP Meetup

[Paul Houle]

    The most effective PHP code doesn't use $_GET,  $_POST,  $_REQUEST 
or any of those superglobals except inside a few subroutines.

    $_GET,  $_POST and $_REQUEST are not reliable across PHP hosting 
environments because some have "magic_quotes_gpc"on and other have it 
off.  There's also the problem that some PHP environments have strict 
variable checking on and others don't.  If you want "value not set" to 
evaluate false without errors and warnings,  you need to write something 
like:

if(isset($_GET["myvar"])) {
    $myvar=$_GET["myvar"];
} else {
    $myvar="";
}

This gets tedious if you need to write it hundreds of times in your 
app,  so write something like

function get($name,$default_value="") {
    if(!isset($_GET[$name])) {
       return $default_value
    };

    if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
       return stripslashes($_GET[$name]);
    } else {
       return $_GET[$name];
    }
}

Now you can forget about magic_quotes_gpc and other runtime 
configuration and go ahead writing reliable apps.  In real life you 
might pick a name that's a little less prone to namespace conflict.