Creating Text Areas


Text areas act like multi-line text fields, and you create them with the HTML <TEXTAREA> element. You can see an example, phptextarea.html, in Example 5-3, where we're asking the user to list his or her friends in a text area named "Friends". When the user clicks the Submit button here, that data will be sent to a PHP script, phptextarea.php, and we'll echo that data in a new web page.

Example 5-3. A text area, phptextarea.html
 <HTML>     <HEAD>         <TITLE>Using Text Areas</TITLE>     </HEAD>     <BODY>         <CENTER>         <H1>Using Text Areas</H1>             <FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="phptextarea.php">                 Please list your best friends:                 <BR>                 <TEXTAREA NAME="Friends" COLS="50" ROWS="5"> 1. 2. 3. 4.                 </TEXTAREA>                 <BR>                 <BR>                 <INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT">             </FORM>         </CENTER>     <BODY> </HTML> 

This web page, textarea.html, appears in Figure 5-3, with some user data.

Figure 5-3. Using a text area.


To recover data from the text area in the PHP script phptextarea.php, you can use $_REQUEST["Friends"], as you see in Example 5-4.

Example 5-4. A text area, phptextarea.php
 <HTML>     <HEAD>         <TITLE>             Using Text Areas         </TITLE>     </HEAD>     <BODY>         <CENTER>             <H1>                 Retrieving Data From Text Areas            </H1>            Your best friends are:            <?php                echo $_REQUEST["Friends"];            ?>         </CENTER>     </BODY> </HTML> 

You can see the results in Figure 5-4, where we've read the text the user entered into the text area. No problem.

Figure 5-4. Reading data from a text area.




    Spring Into PHP 5
    Spring Into PHP 5
    ISBN: 0131498622
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2006
    Pages: 254

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