[php] How do I read any request header in PHP

How should I read any header in PHP?

For example the custom header: X-Requested-With.

I was using CodeIgniter and used the code below to get it. May be useful for someone in future.

$this->input->get_request_header('X-Requested-With');

To make things simple, here is how you can get just the one you want:

Simple:

$headerValue = $_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH'];

or when you need to get one at a time:

<?php
/**
 * @param $pHeaderKey
 * @return mixed
 */
function get_header( $pHeaderKey )
{
    // Expanded for clarity.
    $headerKey = str_replace('-', '_', $pHeaderKey);
    $headerKey = strtoupper($headerKey);
    $headerValue = NULL;
    // Uncomment the if when you do not want to throw an undefined index error.
    // I leave it out because I like my app to tell me when it can't find something I expect.
    //if ( array_key_exists($headerKey, $_SERVER) ) {
    $headerValue = $_SERVER[ $headerKey ];
    //}
    return $headerValue;
}
// X-Requested-With mainly used to identify Ajax requests. Most JavaScript frameworks
// send this header with value of XMLHttpRequest, so this will not always be present.
$header_x_requested_with = get_header( 'X-Requested-With' );

The other headers are also in the super global array $_SERVER, you can read about how to get at them here: http://php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.server.php

Here's how I'm doing it. You need to get all headers if $header_name isn't passed:

<?php
function getHeaders($header_name=null)
{
    $keys=array_keys($_SERVER);

    if(is_null($header_name)) {
            $headers=preg_grep("/^HTTP_(.*)/si", $keys);
    } else {
            $header_name_safe=str_replace("-", "_", strtoupper(preg_quote($header_name)));
            $headers=preg_grep("/^HTTP_${header_name_safe}$/si", $keys);
    }

    foreach($headers as $header) {
            if(is_null($header_name)){
                    $headervals[substr($header, 5)]=$_SERVER[$header];
            } else {
                    return $_SERVER[$header];
            }
    }

    return $headervals;
}
print_r(getHeaders());
echo "\n\n".getHeaders("Accept-Language");
?>

It looks a lot simpler to me than most of the examples given in other answers. This also gets the method (GET/POST/etc.) and the URI requested when getting all of the headers which can be useful if you're trying to use it in logging.

Here's the output:

Array ( [HOST] => 127.0.0.1 [USER_AGENT] => Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:28.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/28.0 [ACCEPT] => text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 [ACCEPT_LANGUAGE] => en-US,en;q=0.5 [ACCEPT_ENCODING] => gzip, deflate [COOKIE] => PHPSESSID=MySessionCookieHere [CONNECTION] => keep-alive )

en-US,en;q=0.5

if only one key is required to retrieved, For example "Host" address is required, then we can use

apache_request_headers()['Host']

So that we can avoid loops and put it inline to the echo outputs

You should find all HTTP headers in the $_SERVER global variable prefixed with HTTP_ uppercased and with dashes (-) replaced by underscores (_).

For instance your X-Requested-With can be found in:

$_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']

It might be convenient to create an associative array from the $_SERVER variable. This can be done in several styles, but here's a function that outputs camelcased keys:

$headers = array();
foreach ($_SERVER as $key => $value) {
    if (strpos($key, 'HTTP_') === 0) {
        $headers[str_replace(' ', '', ucwords(str_replace('_', ' ', strtolower(substr($key, 5)))))] = $value;
    }
}

Now just use $headers['XRequestedWith'] to retrieve the desired header.

PHP manual on $_SERVER: http://php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.server.php

strtolower is lacking in several of the proposed solutions, RFC2616 (HTTP/1.1) defines header fields as case-insensitive entities. The whole thing, not just the value part.

So suggestions like only parsing HTTP_ entries are wrong.

Better would be like this:

if (!function_exists('getallheaders')) {
    foreach ($_SERVER as $name => $value) {
        /* RFC2616 (HTTP/1.1) defines header fields as case-insensitive entities. */
        if (strtolower(substr($name, 0, 5)) == 'http_') {
            $headers[str_replace(' ', '-', ucwords(strtolower(str_replace('_', ' ', substr($name, 5)))))] = $value;
        }
    }
    $this->request_headers = $headers;
} else {
    $this->request_headers = getallheaders();
}

Notice the subtle differences with previous suggestions. The function here also works on php-fpm (+nginx).

This small PHP snippet can be helpful to you:

<?php
foreach($_SERVER as $key => $value){
echo '$_SERVER["'.$key.'"] = '.$value."<br />";
}
?>

function getCustomHeaders()
{
    $headers = array();
    foreach($_SERVER as $key => $value)
    {
        if(preg_match("/^HTTP_X_/", $key))
            $headers[$key] = $value;
    }
    return $headers;
}

I use this function to get the custom headers, if the header starts from "HTTP_X_" we push in the array :)

This work if you have an Apache server

PHP Code:

$headers = apache_request_headers();

foreach ($headers as $header => $value) {
    echo "$header: $value <br />\n";
}

Result:

Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0
Host: www.example.com
Connection: Keep-Alive

Pass a header name to this function to get its value without using for loop. Returns null if header not found.

/**
 * @var string $headerName case insensitive header name
 *
 * @return string|null header value or null if not found
 */
function get_header($headerName)
{
    $headers = getallheaders();
    return isset($headerName) ? $headers[$headerName] : null;
}

Note: this works only with Apache server, see: http://php.net/manual/en/function.getallheaders.php

Note: this function will process and load all of the headers to the memory and it's less performant than a for loop.

$_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']

RFC3875, 4.1.18:

Meta-variables with names beginning with HTTP_ contain values read from the client request header fields, if the protocol used is HTTP. The HTTP header field name is converted to upper case, has all occurrences of - replaced with _ and has HTTP_ prepended to give the meta-variable name.

Since PHP 5.4.0 you can use getallheaders function which returns all request headers as an associative array:

var_dump(getallheaders());

// array(8) {
//   ["Accept"]=>
//   string(63) "text/html[...]"
//   ["Accept-Charset"]=>
//   string(31) "ISSO-8859-1[...]"
//   ["Accept-Encoding"]=>
//   string(17) "gzip,deflate,sdch"
//   ["Accept-Language"]=>
//   string(14) "en-US,en;q=0.8"
//   ["Cache-Control"]=>
//   string(9) "max-age=0"
//   ["Connection"]=>
//   string(10) "keep-alive"
//   ["Host"]=>
//   string(9) "localhost"
//   ["User-Agent"]=>
//   string(108) "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) [...]"
// }

Earlier this function worked only when PHP was running as an Apache/NSAPI module.

PHP 7: Null Coalesce Operator

//$http = 'SCRIPT_NAME';
$http = 'X_REQUESTED_WITH';
$http = strtoupper($http);
$header = $_SERVER['HTTP_'.$http] ?? $_SERVER[$http] ?? NULL;

if(is_null($header)){
    die($http. ' Not Found');
}
echo $header;

Here is an easy way to do it.

// echo get_header('X-Requested-With');
function get_header($field) {
    $headers = headers_list();
    foreach ($headers as $header) {
        list($key, $value) = preg_split('/:\s*/', $header);
        if ($key == $field)
            return $value;
    }
}