Rails - May 2006 - Accessing raw get/post?

Hello all,
could someone please tell me if there a simple way to access the raw  
GET and POST values without going through params or manually parsing  
the request.env[''REQUEST_URI''] string?  I''ve looked
through the
documentation without any success.

something like $_GET[''var''] from php would be ideal.

Thanks for your time,
	
	Gavin