form hidden fields help!!!!

Anon

im having trouble with hidden fields...im using checkboxes and store their values into an array...now say i want to pass that array onto another page...how would i do that?

my array would be called $emailAddress for example..

any help would be appreciated..thanks..

Anon

If you have an array of email addresses, and you want to pass it to the next script, use:

Then in the receiving script use:

$emailAddress = unserialize($email);

... to put it back into an array your script can use.

HTH

-- Rich Rijnders
-- Irvine, CA US

Anon

well there are a couple of ways to do this.. if you are not using an assostive (sp?) arrays (ie $array[0], $array[1] etc..) then you can use the implode() and explode() functions to pass your arrays between forms. Look up these functions to see how they work on php.net it's pretty easy.. Here's the gist of how to do it though. First, you have to implode your array to a new variable say a $temp variable and then in your input tag for your hidden type you would echo out this $temp variable in the value part of the tag to pass it.. now if you want to get that array back you just explode it etc...

if you need anymore help just let me know!

Jay Paulson

Anon

actually i've had some bad luck with this if you use associative arrays. If you do it this way then you also need to str_replace all the double quotes (") in the serialized variable you are passing or the value that is being printed out gets cut short.. therefore when you take the value to the next page you have to str_replace all the charters that you changed in the one you just passed in order to change it back to double quotes (") then unserialize it.. so just be careful how you do it!

Jay Paulson

Anon

its not working....i tried to serialize it and then unserialize it in the next script and it didnt work..i dont know what ot do =(

Anon

you need to do this before you pass it as a hidden type..

<?php
$tmp = serialize($array);
$tmp = str_replace("\"", "~", $tmp);
?>

(this is the next page code after you have subminted the form and passed the hidden)

<?php
$array = str_replace("~", "\"", $tmp);
$array = unserialize($array);
?>

That should work and you should be able to access everything in the $array variable.

Jay

Anon

Yeah, my bad; I havn't had to do it in a while. The lines to serialize and unserialize should be:

Then in the receiving script use:

$emailAddress = unserialize(eregi_replace("'","\"",$email));

Sorry about that...

-- Rich

Anon

Both of these solutions seem to ignore the
possibility that the replacement char for
the quotes may be present in the serialized
data. Is that guaranteed not to happen?
Wouldn't it be safer to use addslashes()
and stripslashes() to do this?

Anon

I thought that might cause a problem with the html output because the browser would still consider the double quote as the end of the "value=" string. I tested it using single quotes as the value delimiter, though, and it seems to work in both Netscape and IE. I don't know if that holds true with other browsers though.

Good call.

-- Rich --

Anon

Well you're right, however do you think that every character is going to be used in the information that you are storing in the "value=" part of the input? I usually replace the double quotes (") with a tilda (~) because those are never used in what i gennerally need to pass. Anyway, you are correct that you need to consider what you are passing before you replace things in your variables...

Jay

Anon

Yeah, I guess we should ask the php people. The serialize() function is documented as returning a "byte-stream representation" of your data, but it does not indicate what ascii characters are potentially part of that return set. If they can steer us to a character that is not used in their encoding scheme, then we would be a long way further toward resoving this issue...

Any PHP developers reading this board?

-- Rich Rijnders
-- Irvine, CA US