How do I access the form's fields?

Anon

OK, I'm a newbie, but I've spent hours searching and I can't figure it out.

I already know some HTML and I just learned pretty much all the basic functions of PHP. But how the hell do you interact between these two?!!

Can someone give me a simple example: I create a form with a single text field called "user" and a "OK" button.

All I want to do (for learning purposes) is to display "Hello, username" when the user clicks the OK button.

I've tried: echo "hello, ".$user;
but it gives me a parse error.

Shouldn't this be the simplest thing to do? How come this is not in any manual or website? I've read many PHP tutorials but they all stick to showing you how to be an excellent PHP programmer but skip this part which is vital for a newbie like me.

Any help greatly appreciated.

nnichols

if the form action points to "display_user.php" you could write "display_user.php" as

<?
echo "hello, $user";
?>

this is only works if "register_globals = on" in your php.ini file. If this is off you can use

<?
$username = $_POST['user'];
echo "hello, $username";
?>

Anon

What do you mean it's not in the manual?

There's a whole section on it:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.variables.external.php

khaine

You may benefit from a good book. I can recommend the visual quickstart guide. from peachpit press. Its very good for the newbie.

As for your example

page1.html

What is your name
<INPUT type="text size="20" name="namein">
<P>
<INPUT type="submit" value="Submit">

</FORM>

</BODY>

process.php

Hope that helps.

Mark.

Anon

Thanks for your reply to my post about PHP and interacting with variables.

I tried what you posted, but got the following error:

Notice: Undefined index: user1 in C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\htdocs\login1.php on line 7

I triple checked the variable names and case. The text box is called user1 in my HTML file. I also tried turning on register_globals, but always got the same result:

Notice: Undefined variable: user1 in C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\htdocs\login1.php on line 9

Can it be something I configured wrong? I installed MySQL, Apache and PHP4 myself, so anything is possible.

For your reference, here's my HTML. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
<title>New Page 1</title>
</head>
<body>
<form method="POST" action="http://192.168.0.1/login1.php">
Usuario: <input type="text" name=:"user1"><br>
<p>
<input type="submit" value="OK" name="B1">
<br>
<br>
</form>
</body>

and this is my login1.php:
<?php

echo "Welcome, ".$user1;
?>

This is the optional login1.php:
<?php

$a = $_POST['user1'];
echo "welcome, ".$a;
?>