What is form name=?

[mcrbids]

Go to excite, google or yahoo. You'll find that their submission forms go something like this:

<form name="AJ" action="/search.shtml" method="post">
<input name=whatever type=text>
</form>

What does the "name=" tag mean, and how would I capture this information? Can this be used to have a single target page handle multiple types of forms?

-Ben

[kparker]

It's mostly useful for Javascript: you can access the forms' elements from JS by name.

[Anon]

For input fields, when the data is submitted in PHP the value is assigned to the variable of that name... So for example, if you had a text input like

<input type=text name=username>

And it was submitted, on the next page the value the person entered for that field would be assigned to $username.

[kparker]

Hmm, I thought he was asking just about the &lt;form name=, but now I'm not so sure.