Quote:

Forgive my ignorance, but I am modifying (rewriting) a module that has this line at the top of the index.php (and several other places). What does it do? Can I remove it and use $_POST instead, or will that cause people problems who aren't using the latest versions of PHP?

I saw this code on another forum too, and if I remember correctly, it is used to convert $_POST['postedvar'] to $postedvar, so it's actually being used to make the module work with register_globals off.

It does exactly that.

For each $HTTP_POST_VARS (which btw should be $_POST in the future) it takes the index and turns it into a variable - just like register globals.

The official XOOPS opinion is that we module developers shouldn't be so lazy and start using $_POST['varname'] instead of this loop to get $varname. This is a good coding practice and will hopefully make it easier to sustain security in XOOPS.

So, what I am hearing is that I can simply delete these lines, and anytime I need to access $_POST data, I should just use $_POST['thingy']. OK, I will take Mithrandir's advice and not be lazy.

On a related note, if I want to send all the POST data to a function, can I just do this:

$result = doYourThingWithPOSTData($_POST);

Does that make a copy, or can I send it by reference by defining my function like this (I am a C++ programmer in real life, so this syntax could be wrong):

function doYourThingWithPOSTData(&$_POST){ . . . }


Or, is there a better way to make all current $_POST data available inside other functions and classes other than explicitly passing it? Basically, I have code that works now, but I am refactoring to make it much simpler and object-oriented. Before, everything was in index.php, but that has grown too big to manage.

Thanks for any help.

I believe $_POST, $_GET, $_COOKIE, $_SERVER, $_SESSION etc. are all available in functions as well - even without defining them as global in the function declaration.

Yes, those variables are called superglobals, and are available everywhere, including functions.