Introduction

bakame/http-structured-fields is a framework-agnostic PHP library that allows you to parse, serialize, create, update and validate HTTP Structured Fields in PHP according to the RFC9651.

Once installed you will be able to do the following:

use Bakame\Http\StructuredFields\DataType;

$fieldValue = 'text/html, application/xhtml+xml, application/xml;q=0.9, image/webp, */*;q=0.8';
$container = DataType::List->parse($fieldValue);
$container[1]->value()->toString(); // returns 'application/xhtml+xml'
$container[1]->parameterByKey(key: 'q', default: 1.0); // returns 1.0 if the parameter is not defined

Motivation

While they are plenty of HTTP headers and trailers, they have historically come each with their own set of rules and constraints when it came to parsing and serializing them. Trying to use the parsing logic of a cookie header to parse an accept header will fail. The various parsing logics hinder HTTP headers and trailers usage, modernization or security. The Structured Field RFC aim at tackling those issues by unifying HTTP headers and trailers parsing and serializing.

New HTTP headers or trailers (called HTTP fields) are encouraged to use the RFC algorithm, data and value types and ongoing discussions are happening to retrofit existing headers that do not match the RFC into new shapes that would be compatible with it.