php - $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] missing

Question

I want to use $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] in my site but i get the following:

Notice: Undefined index: HTTP_REFERER 

I have tried printing $_SERVER. This outputs the following:

Array
(
    [HTTP_HOST] => 192.168.1.10
    [HTTP_USER_AGENT] => Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0
    [HTTP_ACCEPT] => text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
    [HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE] => en-us,en;q=0.5
    [HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING] => gzip, deflate
    [HTTP_CONNECTION] => keep-alive
    [PATH] => /sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin
    [SERVER_SIGNATURE] => Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) Server at 192.168.1.10 Port 80
    [SERVER_SOFTWARE] => Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
    [SERVER_NAME] => 192.168.1.10
    [SERVER_ADDR] => 192.168.1.10
    [SERVER_PORT] => 80
    [REMOTE_ADDR] => 192.168.1.77
    [DOCUMENT_ROOT] => /var/www/html
    [SERVER_ADMIN] => root@localhost
    [SCRIPT_FILENAME] => /var/www/html/sandeep/test/hash.php
    [REMOTE_PORT] => 53851
    [GATEWAY_INTERFACE] => CGI/1.1
    [SERVER_PROTOCOL] => HTTP/1.1
    [REQUEST_METHOD] => GET
    [QUERY_STRING] => 
    [REQUEST_URI] => /sandeep/test/hash.php
    [SCRIPT_NAME] => /sandeep/test/hash.php
    [PHP_SELF] => /sandeep/test/hash.php
    [REQUEST_TIME] => 1347365919
)

Can anyone help me to find HTTP_REFERER or suggest an alternative to HTTP_REFERER?

Answer 1

From the documentation:

The address of the page (if any) which referred the user agent to the current page. This is set by the user agent. Not all user agents will set this, and some provide the ability to modify HTTP_REFERER as a feature. In short, it cannot really be trusted.

http://php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.server.php