How to check if the request is an AJAX request with PHP

Question

I would like to check server-side if a request to my php page is an ajax request or not.

I saw two ways to do this:

First way: sending a GET parameter in the request which tells the page that this is an AJAX request (=mypage.php?ajax)

mypage.php:

if(isset($_GET['ajax'])) {
    //this is an ajax request, process data here.
}

Second way: set a header to the xmlHttpRequest:

client-side js:

xmlHttpRequestObject.open(“GET”,url,true);
xmlHttpRequestObject.setRequestHeader('X-Requested-With', 'XMLHttpRequest');

mypage.php:

if (!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) && strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) == 'xmlhttprequest' ) {
    //request is ajax
}

---

The fact is, those two ways of doing it can easily be hacked, so it's not secure to check if i get an AJAX request like this.

How can i check if i'm receiving an AJAX request?

Answer 1

Here is the tutorial of achieving the result.

Example:

if(!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) && strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) == 'xmlhttprequest')
{    
  exit;    
}
continue;

This checks if the HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH parameter is not empty and if it's equal to xmlhttprequest, then it will exit from the script.