['something']</span></tt>)
is that the methods will check to see if the item is set and return
NULL if not. This lets you conveniently use data without
having to test whether an item exists first. In other words, normally
you might do something like this:</p>
<div class="highlight-ci"><div class="highlight"><pre><span class="nv">$something</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="nb">isset</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="nv">$_POST</span><span class="p">[</span><span class="s1">&#39;something