Requests: has() and hasFile()

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!