Phly, boy, phly
the weblog and site of Matthew Weier O'Phinney

I've been playing with parameter testing in my various Cgiapp classes, and one test that seemed pretty slick was the following:

    if (!array_key_exists('some_string', $_REQUEST)) {
        // some error
    }

Seems pretty straight-forward: $_REQUEST is an associative array, and I want to test for the existence of a key in it. Sure, I could use isset(), but it seemed... ugly, and verbose, and a waste of keystrokes, particularly when I'm using the param() method:

    if (!isset($_REQUEST[$this->param('some_param')])) {
        // some error
    }

However, I ran into a pitfall: when it comes to array_key_exists(), $_REQUEST isn't exactly an array. I think what's going on is that $_REQUEST is actually a superset of several other arrays -- $_POST, $_GET, and $_COOKIE -- and isset() has some logic to descend amongst the various keys, while array_key_exists() can only work on a single level.

Whatever the explanation, I ended up reverting a bunch of code.