||- About forms -- I'm very dissapointed

[sfullman]

Hello,

I used to program with ASP. PHP has many great features and advantages over PHP but I'm a little bit irritated with how it handles form collections.

In ASP, if I have 2 or more fields with the same name as so:

<input name="collection" value= "John">
<input name="collection" value= "Tommy">
<input name="collection" value= "Bob">

and I want to echo the value of "collection", I will get the value as "John, Tommy, Bob" (i.e. all values separated by a comma and a space).

In my form collections using PHP, all you get is "Bob" or the last value of the field "collection" to come across.

Is there some way to configure the settings on PHP so that I get the ASP-style form collection? Please let me know or I have a bunch of re-programming to do.

I'm surprised something this obvious is not a default in PHP.

Sam Fullman
Compass Point Media

[wombatee]

Heh heh... I've never programmed in ASP before, but that seems like a drawback to me... what happens if someone enters "Tom, Sally, Moo Cow" into one field? Sounds like it would be hard to tell if that input came from one field or three separate ones. But I'm just being argumentative now 🙂

The answer to your question is this... if you name your inputs like this:

<input name='collection[]' value='Bob'>
<input name='collection[]' valeu='Tom'>

then your values come into your script as the variable $collection. $collection is now an array, so you'll have

$collection[0] == 'Bob'
$collection[1] == 'Tom'

etc. You can even name your inputs like this

<input name='collection[10]' value='Bob'>
<input name='collection[11]' valeu='Tom'>

if you want them to have specific key values.

Cheers!

Omega Wombat
http://www.drinknation.com