The current PHPStan failure appears unrelated to this PR. It is in system/View/Parser.php, which this PR does not touch.

I was about to approve this, but while reading the updated user guide I realized we already have getRawInput(), which returns an array. That makes the new get*Input() naming harder to reason about, because the suffix would not consistently mean "returns an InputData object".

Maybe this is a sign that the long-term API should be a small source-selector object instead of more methods directly on IncomingRequest? For example, IncomingRequest::input() could return something like CodeIgniter\Input\RequestInput:

namespace CodeIgniter\Input;

use CodeIgniter\HTTP\Exceptions\HTTPException;
use CodeIgniter\HTTP\IncomingRequest;

final class RequestInput
{
    public function __construct(
        private readonly IncomingRequest $request,
        private readonly InputDataFactory $factory,
    ) {
    }

    public function get(): InputData
    {
        $data = $this->request->getGet();

        return $this->factory->create(is_array($data) ? $data : []);
    }

    public function post(): InputData
    {
        $data = $this->request->getPost();

        return $this->factory->create(is_array($data) ? $data : []);
    }

    public function json(): InputData
    {
        $data = $this->request->getJSON(true) ?? [];

        if (! is_array($data)) {
            throw HTTPException::forUnsupportedJSONFormat();
        }

        return $this->factory->create($data);
    }

    public function raw(): InputData
    {
        return $this->factory->create($this->request->getRawInput());
    }
}

Then in IncomingRequest:

private ?RequestInput $input = null;

public function input(): RequestInput
{
    return $this->input ??= new RequestInput($this, service('inputdatafactory'));
}

Usage:

$page = $request->input()->get()->integer('page', 1);
$name = $request->input()->json()->string('name');
$title = $request->input()->raw()->string('title');

This would avoid overloading the existing getRawInput() naming and would give us room to add more typed input sources later without adding more top-level request methods. Thoughts?

Thanks @michalsn, I see what you mean. The get*Input() naming does start to look a bit odd once getRawInput() enters the room.

I'm happy to reshape it around input(). Before I start moving things around: do you have a preference on where that helper should live? Since it would depend on IncomingRequest, CodeIgniter\HTTP\RequestInput feels a bit more natural to me than putting it under CodeIgniter\Input, but I wanted to check first.

Yes, you're right, CodeIgniter\HTTP\RequestInput sounds better here.

Maybe @paulbalandan can take a look at this proposal, so we can spot some weak points.