The application will modify the form data when it is captured into the $_GET, $_POST, and $_REQUEST variables. The adjustments are applied to the same reference. Therefore, you may need to change your old habits of interacting with the raw form data from PHP. We perform these operations before your form processing to secure and clean the data, so that it can be safely written to a file.

This application will evaluate each value passed to the $_GET, $_POST, and $_REQUEST variables and attempt to convert it to an integer or float value if it is a valid number string, and will convert the strings 'false', 'null', and 'true' to literal false, null, and true. This conversion is done by the e() function.

Such strict comparisons are allowed in this application and will produce correct results:

if (true === $_POST['is']['active'] && 1 === $_POST['status']) {
    // …
}

All white-space characters at the beginning and end of a value will be removed, preventing users from bypassing required input validation:

<form method="post">
  <!-- `$_POST['a']` will have a value of `true` -->
  <input name="a" value="true">
  <!-- `$_POST['b']` will have a value of `1` -->
  <input name="b" value="1">
  <!-- `$_POST['c']` will have a value of `null` -->
  <input name="c" value="">
  <!-- `$_POST['d']` will have a value of `null` -->
  <input name="d" required value="    ">
  <!-- `$_POST['e']` will have a value of `'asdf'` -->
  <input name="e" value="asdf">
  <!-- `$_POST['f']` will have a value of `'asdf'` -->
  <input name="f" value=" asdf  ">
  <!-- `$_POST['g']` will have a value of `null` -->
  <input name="g">
  <!-- `$_POST['h']` will have a value of `[1, 2, true]` -->
  <input name="h[]" value="1">
  <input name="h[]" value="2">
  <input name="h[]" value="true">
</form>

In the condition that after all white-spaces characters have been trimmed and the end result is an empty string, then the value will be normalized to null. This simplifies determining the default value when the user leaves input data blank:

$active = $_POST['active'] ?? true;

Compare to this complicated conditional in native PHP application to get the same result:

$active = true; // Set default value
if (isset($_POST['active'])) {
    $active = strtolower(trim($_POST['active']));
    if ('false' === $active) {
        $active = false;
    } else if ('true' === $active) {
        $active = true;
    } else if ("" === $active || 'null' === $active) {
        $active = true; // Default value
    }
}

The value of $_FILES variable has no practical use in this application. Instead, all values in this variable will be rearranged into an associative array with custom keys to be combined with the $_POST variable values:

<form enctype="multipart/form-data" method="post">
  <input name="file" type="file">
  <input name="file[_test]" type="hidden" value="1">
</form>

When the form above is submitted, the $_POST variable will contain these data:

$_POST = [
    'file' => [
        '_test' => 1,
        'from' => 'example.png',
        'name' => 'example.png',
        'path' => '/tmp/php9gNNH6',
        'size' => 82884,
        'status' => 0,
        'type' => 'image/png'
    ]
];

Then, you can process the data manually one by one or by using the store() function.