PHP POST method not posting “type=file” variable

I am updating some old PHP to move away from global variables and use $_GET, $_POST, etc (among plenty of other things).  I bumped into an issue where my image upload form was not passing type=file variables to $_POST. The form looks like so:

<div class="block">
<label>upload photo</label> 
	<input type="file" name="userpic">
</div>

I couldn’t get the value via the following:

$userpic = $_POST['userpic'];

W3Schools to the rescue.

By using the global PHP $_FILES array you can upload files from a client computer to the remote server. The first parameter is the form’s input name and the second index can be either “name”, “type”, “size”, “tmp_name” or “error”.

The answer is therefore:

$userpic = $_FILES['userpic']['name'];

Hope this helps someone!