PHP 5.0 stores HTTP headers in the $_SERVER variable as key-value pairs. It mangles their field names, however, by:
- prepending “HTTP_” to the key
- replacing “-” with “_” in the key
- uppercasing all letters
Say that your custom HTTP client sends X-Hello: World as a header. To retrieve the value (e.g. “world”) from PHP, the correct key to use is $_SERVER["HTTP_X_HELLO"].
This does fit with the existing access pattern (User-Agent: is retrieved by $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']). But it was not well documented in corresponding page for reserved variables (as of today, October 7, 2007). Took a bit of trial and error for me to figure this out.
I’m sure that amongst the insanely numerous and ill-organized set of functions that PHP provides, there is one to do this exact task without reverse-engineering its key-mangling algorithm. But this way works too.