How to process PUT requests with PHP

You are probably already familiar with $_GET, $_POST and $_REQUEST but what about $_PUT? Trick question, $_PUT (as well as as $_HEAD and $_DELETE) doesn’t exist in PHP at this time. Never fear! We can create a $_PUT array with the following code:

if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'PUT')
{
	parse_str(file_get_contents("php://input"), $_PUT);

	foreach ($_PUT as $key => $value)
	{
		unset($_PUT[$key]);

		$_PUT[str_replace('amp;', '', $key)] = $value;
	}

	$_REQUEST = array_merge($_REQUEST, $_PUT);
}

Fortunately, PHP does understand PUT as a request method, so first we check to see if we should be expecting a PUT request. The next line gets the contents of the php://input stream, and parses it into an array (stored as $_PUT).

The foreach does some cleanup as parse_str splits on the literal ampersand. This is actually some code that I’ve implemented on a site of mine without any issues, but as I look at this, I wonder if there’s any repercussions to this method. Let me know if you run into any issues!

Once we’re done cleaning up the data, we merge it back into $_REQUEST to give it the same interfacing as $_GET and $_POST.