Manual:WebRequest.php/en

WebRequest
The WebRequest class which encapsulates getting at data passed in the URL or via a POSTed form, handling remove of "magic quotes" slashes, stripping illegal input characters and normalizing Unicode sequences. You can access the standard WebRequest through the. You should not create additional instances of this class. Instead create a DerivativeRequest or use FauxRequest if there is no user request context.

Functions
... many more, this is a partial list.
 * : get a scalar or null if the parameter was not passed
 * : same as before, but the value returned is an integer
 * : same as getVal, but returns a boolean value
 * : get an array or null if the parameter was not passed. If the parameter is a scalar, it will return an array with a single element.
 * : return a boolean whether the parameter was passed, this is useful for checkboxes.
 * : get a cookie from the $_COOKIE jar
 * : returns a bool whether the request was posted

FauxRequest
FauxRequest is a class extending WebRequest. Its purpose is to emulate a request with the values passed to the constructor.

Also see for an example that creates a DerivativeRequest to make an API call.