perch_post()

The perch_post() function does the same job as $_POST in PHP, but has some convenient safeguards and options built in.

PHP has a standard way to read values from POST requests. If you’ve done any PHP development, you’ll be familiar with using something like $_POST['message'] to read a value from a POST request.

You can do that in Perch, too. However, $_POST can be hard to use, because if you try to read in a value that hasn’t been set, PHP will throw an error. This means you need to test for it being set, and decide whether to read it or not. To make life easier, Perch has perch_post().

Parameters

Usage examples

If we have a HTML form with method="post":

<form action="contact.php" method="post">
    <label for="visitor_name">Name</label>
    <input type="text" name="visitor_name" id="visitor_name">
    <input type="submit">
</form>

We can get the value of the submitted field visitor_name using perch_post():

$name = perch_post('visitor_name');

If we want to set the name to “Anonymous” if there is no visitor_name value, we can use:

$name = perch_post('visitor_name', 'Anonymous');

By default, the function returns false if it cannot find the submitted value. This means we can use it in conditional statements:

if(perch_post('agree_terms')) {
    // only process data if user agrees to terms
}