About capturing $_GET and $_POST

[Zoruglu]

Hello everyone!

I stumbeled on this function in Invisionboard (the function is below):
It overrides $GET data with $POST data, and stores it into 1 global array to be used all over the script.

I like the idea, however I was wondering why one would do this?

    /*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*/
    // Makes incoming info "safe"              

    /*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*/

/**
* Parse _GET _POST data
*
* Clean up and unHTML
*
* @return	void
* @since	Time began
*/
function parse_incoming()
{
	# THIS NEEDS TO BE HERE!
	$this->get_magic_quotes = @get_magic_quotes_gpc();

	if ( is_array($_GET) )
	{
		while( list($k, $v) = each($_GET) )
		{
			if ( is_array($_GET[$k]) )
			{
				while( list($k2, $v2) = each($_GET[$k]) )
				{
					$this->input[ $this->parse_clean_key($k) ][ $this->parse_clean_key($k2) ] = $this->parse_clean_value($v2);
				}
			}
			else
			{
				$this->input[ $this->parse_clean_key($k) ] = $this->parse_clean_value($v);
			}
		}
	}

	//----------------------------------------
	// Overwrite GET data with post data
	//----------------------------------------

	if ( is_array($_POST) )
	{
		while( list($k, $v) = each($_POST) )
		{
			if ( is_array($_POST[$k]) )
			{
				while( list($k2, $v2) = each($_POST[$k]) )
				{
					$this->input[ $this->parse_clean_key($k) ][ $this->parse_clean_key($k2) ] = $this->parse_clean_value($v2);
				}
			}
			else
			{
				$this->input[ $this->parse_clean_key($k) ] = $this->parse_clean_value($v);
			}
		}
	}

	$this->input['request_method'] = strtolower($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD']);
}

[Weedpacket]

I guess it's because POST-supplied data is slightly (but only slightly) less likely to be corrupted than GET data. It means that someone can't modify the contents of a POSTed form by simply adding stuff to the querystring.

But if you wanted to move $GET data (overriding it by $POST data) into a new array, then $combined_submission_data = array_merge($GET, $POST) would do the job quite happily thankyouverymuch.

The code looks odd in other ways: while(list...each) instead of foreach(); is_array($_POST[$k]) instead of is_array($v) ....

[Zoruglu]

Yes, I too found it odd too that foreach wasn't used.... I was wondering if there is a reason why one would prefere to use while(list...each) over foreach()?
I thought foreach() was there to replace while(list...each) anyway?

And thx for the tip btw, array_merge() seems to be good indeed. Would there be a reason why one would manualy go through the $POST and $GET arrays?

For what I can see, it is done manualy because the keys and the values are being sanitized by 2 other functions ( $this->parse_clean_key(), $this->parse_clean_value() ) and I don't see how you could use those with array_merge?

Edit: Oh and one last thing, why would the function check if the value in the loop is a key? I didn't know $POST and $GET could be multidimensional arrays?