string change over-ride

Anon

I have tried many ways to do this as suggested by v helpful people on this forum, but I did not explain myself very well to begin with. This should be better.

I have a php file that contains this phrase
<?php

$goalie="brown"

which defines all references to $goalie in a teamsheet beneath it and a second form even further down the script. without this string the $goalie would, of course, be undefined and the php file would be blank to the user

I want my users to be able to change this string in the php file through another form to any one of 30 goalies in my soccer fantasy league:jones, smith, bond, etc

but the whole string must change for the $goalies in the script below to also change. so that after sending the form to change goalie with, say, jones in the field i look at the php file and the string says

<?php

$goalie="jones"

I have tried several suggestions and this is not happening - it stays at $goalie="brown". It is as if the command $goalie="brown" overrides anything a form sends to try to change it. If there is a way of overriding the over-ride it would be brilliant. I wonder if anyone out here knows whether this is possible.

cheers mickey

Anon

If you're trying to use $goalie to refer to the goalie selected in the form, then that selection will be overwritten by the line

$goalie='brown';

as you've noted. But instead of using $goalie to refer to the form selection, use $_POST['goalie'] (assuming your form uses the POST method).

Then, instead of just saying
$goalie='brown';

say
$goalie='brown';
if(isset($POST['goalie'])) // We've selected a new goalie.
$goalie = $POST['goalie'];

So that $goalie is only brown if none other was selected.

Of course, this means that the goalie has to be reselected on every page submission, otherwise it will just switch back to brown. What's needed is some way for the script to remember that that user has selected jones (say) and continue to use that name. But we also want to be able to change it later if we want. This is what session variables were invented for:

session_start();

$goalie='brown'; // Our default - let's see if it needs to change.

if(isset($SESSION['goalie'])) // We have a goalie.
$goalie=$SESSION['goalie'];

if(isset($POST['goalie'])) // We're changing the goalie
{ $goalie = $SESSION['goalie'] = $_POST['goalie']; // Update the current and remembered values
}

Anon

Hi Grumbler

Thanks for trying to help me with this. You're dealing with a real newbie however. Have tried to do what you say:

form is goalieform.html

<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<TITLE>Untitled</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<FORM action ="goalie.php" METHOD="POST">
<INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="goalie">
<BR><INPUT TYPE="Submit" VALUE="Submit">
</FORM>
</BODY>

sending to this test php file

<body>
<?php

$goalie='brown';
if(isset($POST['goalie'])) // We've selected a new goalie.
$goalie = $POST['goalie'];

echo $goalie
?>
</body>

whenever I put the $_POST['goalie'] before the $goalie='brown' tag in I get a parse error. If I leave it out I don't get the error but the change doesn't happen

also when I try the session script beneath I get 'can't run session' and 'can't run limited cache' warnings printed on the page.

hope you're still out there!

Anon

The code you give looks (and runs) perfectly fine to me. It first sets $goalie to 'brown', but replaces it with $POST['goalie'] if $POST['goalie'] has a value. If you mean the line

$goalie = $SESSION['goalie'] = $POST['goalie'];

That should work (set the sessioned value of goalie to the posted value, then set the local value to the value of that), but it could be done with two lines:

$goalie = $POST['goalie'];
$SESSION['goalie'] = $_POST['goalie'];

if necessary.

I've never seen the error messages you describe wrt sessioning, and sounds like a configuration problem; I did forget to mention that session_start() has to be run before anything else is sent to the browser (even blank lines count as "anything else"), so should usually be on pretty much the very first line of the script:

---------goalie.php-------
<?php
session_start(); //Alright, maybe the second 🙂

or even
---------goalie.php-------
<?php session_start();

But the error messages would have been different.

Perhaps you should repost this particular problem in a seperate thread?