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Requests: has() and hasFile()

October 27, 2015

1 min read

Tutorial last revisioned on August 18, 2022 with Laravel 9

Another quick tip and thing to watch out for. When processing form data, how do you check if the field is not empty? With $request->has('field'), right? But what about uploaded files? The thing is: if you have a file field, and you try to check it with $request->has('file'), it will always return FALSE. For files there is a specific method:

if ($request->hasFile('photo')) {
    //
}

Speaking here from my own experience - once it took me a while to figure out why $request->has() doesn't return TRUE, although I could swear I'm uploading the right file. Hopefully a useful short tip!