Input Class

Calling the Input Class

class Input

ExpressionEngine uses the Input class for two main purposes:

1. To provide some helper methods for fetching input data and pre-processing it.
2. To pre-process global input data for security.

This class is initialized automatically.

Fetching a Superglobal value

You are not required to use this class to call the incoming data from the superglobal arrays, it will still be available through the superglobals themselves. However, the input class does offer some benefits.

All of the superglobal methods allow the specification of an optional second parameter that lets you run the data through the XSS filter. It’s enabled by setting the second parameter to TRUE (boolean).

Lastly, the superglobal methods will check to see if the item is set and return FALSE (boolean) if not. This lets you conveniently use data without testing whether an item exists first. In other words, normally you might do something like this:

if ( ! isset($_POST['something']))
{
    $something = FALSE;
}
else
{
    $something = $_POST['something'];
}

With the built-in methods you can simply do this:

$something = ee()->input->post('something');

To automatically run the returned data through the Security::xss_clean method, simply specify the second parameter is TRUE:

$something = ee()->input->post('something', TRUE);

The available superglobal methods are:

ee()->input->post('some_data');

ee()->input->get('some_data');

ee()->input->get_post('some_data');

ee()->input->cookie('some_data');

ee()->input->server('some_data');

echo ee()->input->ip_address();

if ( ! $this->input->valid_ip($ip))
{
    echo 'Not Valid';
}
else
{
    echo 'Valid';
}

echo ee()->input->user_agent();

Cleaning Superglobals

The input class is loaded by EE core early in processing. It automatically does the following:

• Destroys all global variables in the event register_globals is turned on.
• Filters the POST/GET/COOKIE array keys, permitting only alpha-numeric (and a few other) characters.
• Standardizes newline characters to \\n

Setting and Deleting Cookies

The input library contains two methods for manipulating cookies. One for setting them and one for deleting them before their expiration.