Arrays and Forms

rivka

I've been poking around on these forums trying to find an answer to what is a fairly basic question, but not having any luck so far. So: I have a query from a database that pulls up a list of results, from which I need to select several items and then do something with them. Like so:

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * from table");

echo = "<form method=\"POST\" enctype=\"multipart/form-data\" action=\"thepage.php\">";

while($results = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
echo "<INPUT type=\"checkbox\" name=\"checkbox[]\"> <INPUT type=\"hidden\" name=\"thename[]\" value=\"$results[thename]>$results[thename]";
}

echo "<INPUT type=\"submit\" name=\"submit\" value=\"submit\"></form>"

On the next page, I try to do something with the results of the form. Specifically, I want to do something to each of the items that had a check next to them. For now, I'd be happy if it would just print out the thename associated with each checkbox, but now it just prints out Array.

foreach($_POST["checkbox"] as $key => $check)
{
echo "$check[thename]";
}

So what am I doing wrong? Any help would be appreciated...

cgraz

foreach($array as $key => $value) {
// use the key and value here
}

What the above foreach loop does is foreach element of the array, it grabs the key and value and puts them in an variable. The key is stored in $key and the value is stored in $value. Since you're doing this, you don't need to do $value['thename'], you can just do $value.

foreach($_POST["checkbox"] as $key => $check) { 
echo $check; 
}

But i'd recommend adding a <br> after each echo of $check, or else you'll get one long line of values with not spaces.

echo $check . "<br>";

Cgraz

rivka

All that's doing is printing out that the checkbox is on for each item -- I want to print the name of each item ("thename" which is a field from the table) next to each checkbox that was selected. But thanks for your help so far 🙂

cgraz

thename[] is from the hidden input field. If you want that value, just use

foreach($_POST["thename"] as $value) { 
echo $value; 
}

Cgraz

rivka

Ah, but that is now printing out ALL the results from the previous page, not just just the ones that I checked.

I'm sorry -- I must seem very stupid. I just want to pull up a list of results from a table, with checkboxes next to each one, select just some of those items, and on the next page, do something to those items that were selected. Perhaps my initial way of doing it was all wrong?

cgraz

Yes, you simply need to combine both fields.

echo $results[thename] . " <INPUT type=\"checkbox\" name=\"checkbox[]\" value=\"$results[thename]\">";

Then to get the values for the ones that were checked. . .

foreach($checkbox as $value) {
   echo $value . "<br>";
}

Cgraz

rivka

Yay 🙂 That did it. Thanks so much. Out of curiousity, what if I had had two columns of results that I needed to pull over and do stuff with. I.e. I pulled from the table the fields "thename" and "birthday" -- how would I do it then? Multiple value statements in the checkbox input or something?

cgraz

never done that before, but maybe seperate both values with an underscore or something, then explode it later into 2 seperate values. The underscore will just seperate the two values so you can tell them apart, then you can convert them into their own arrays later. I don't know, just an idea. I'm sure there's a better way of doing it, that's the first thing that comes to mind from my limited experience.

Cgraz