Accessing Form Input with User-Defined Arrays
| The previous example showed how to gather information from HTML elements that submit a single value per element name, such as text fields, text areas, and radio buttons. This leaves us with a problem when working with elements like SELECT because it is possible for the user to choose one or more items from a multiple SELECT list. If we name the SELECT element with a plain name, like so <select name="products" multiple> the script that receives this data has access to only a single value corresponding to this name ($_POST["products"]). We can change this behavior by renaming an element of this kind so that its name ends with an empty set of square brackets. We do this in Listing 11.3. Listing 11.3. An HTML Form Including a SELECT Element
Put these lines into a text file called formwithselect.html and place that file in your web server document root. Next, in the script that processes the form input, we find that input from the "products[]" form element created on line 10 is available in an array called $_POST["products"]. Because products[] is a SELECT element, we offer the user multiple choices using the option elements on lines 11 through 14. We demonstrate that the user's choices are made available in an array in Listing 11.4. Listing 11.4. Reading Input from the Form in Listing 11.3
Put these lines into a text file called send_formwithselect.php and place that file in your web server document root. Now access the form with your web browser and fill out the fields. Figure 11.2 shows an example. Figure 11.2. The form created in Listing 11.3. On line 2 of the script in Listing 11.4, we access the $_POST["user"] variable, which is derived from the user form element. On line 4, we test for the $_POST["products"] variable. If $_POST["products"] is present, we loop through it on line 6, and output each choice to the browser on line 7. The text within the value attribute of the selected OPTION element becomes one of the stored values in the array. Submit the form, and you might see something like that shown in Figure 11.3. Figure 11.3. Sample output of send_formwithselect.php. Although the looping technique is particularly useful with the SELECT element, it can work with other types of form elements as well. For example, by giving a number of check boxes the same name, you can enable a user to choose many values within a single field name. As long as the name you choose ends with empty square brackets, PHP compiles the user input for this field into an array. We can replace the SELECT elements from lines 1114 in Listing 11.3 with a series of check boxes to achieve the same effect: <input type="checkbox" name="products[]" value="Sonic Screwdriver"/>Sonic Screwdriver<br/> <input type="checkbox" name="products[]" value="Tricorder"/>Tricorder<br/> <input type="checkbox" name="products[]" value="ORAC AI"/>ORAC AI<br/> <input type="checkbox" name="products[]" value="HAL 2000"/>HAL 2000<br/> The selected values will still be accessible using the $_POST["products"] variable, just as if they came from the multiple SELECT list in Listing 11.4. |
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