Form stuff

[eternalprophet]

You are to create a PHP program named states.php that creates a scalar value $states that will accept 5 state names from the user.

OK, I know how to make an array. That's cool. With the rest of the instructions, I know I have to move one state to position 0 and one state to position 1, so I need an array with 7 positions (0-6) Sorry, I dunno all the lingo stuff 🙂

Anyway, one page, entitled form.php, I have...

<form name="stateentry">
<input type="text" name="states[2]">
<input type="text" name="states[3]">
<input type="text" name="states[4]">
<input type="text" name="states[5]">
<input type="text" name="states[6]">
<input type="reset">
<input type="submit">
</form>

K, got the form. How do I get the form to submit to the page with the array (states.php) and accept the states entered by the user in the form?

I tried using post, but that didn't work. I was told to use $HTTP_POST_VARS but I have no clue where to use it or why I can't simply use post.

Any suggestions?

[YappyDog]

Well, I would change your form to the following:

<form name="stateentry" method=post action=states.php>
<input type="text" name="states0">
<input type="text" name="states1">
<input type="text" name="states2">
<input type="text" name="states3">
<input type="text" name="states4">
<input type="reset">
<input type="submit">
</form>

Then in states.php you just need to do:

$states[0] = $HTTP_POST_VARS["states0"];
$states[1] = $HTTP_POST_VARS["states1"];
etc.....

[coditoergosum]

First off, you need to tell your form where to go when you click the submit button. This is accomplished by adding action="mypage.php" in your form tag. You really should specify the request method in the form tag too... either GET or POST. Most people use POST for most forms. Using GET will reveal the vars in the url (www.myserver.com/mypage.php?foo=bar). Add method="post" in your form tag.

Now that you have the form setup correctly, once it posts to your script it depends on how your server is setup as to how to get the vars. If register_globals is ON then you can just use the var name as it is in your form, i.e. $states[]. By default register_globals is off. If register globals is off, then you need to use either the superglobal $POST[] (or $GET), or the older $HTTP_POST_VARS[] (or $HTTP_GET_VARS[]), i.e. $_POST['states'][$i] ($i is an integer referencing an array key).

Also, you would probably benefit from reading chapter 8 of the PHP manual which talks about variables: http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.variables.php .

Hope this helps.

[coditoergosum]

One other thing... FYI. Superglobals were added to PHP in version 4.1.0. If you're using an older version, you can't use superglobals... if your version supports them, it's preferred to use them instead of older versions of the var, i.e. $HTTP_POST_VARS.

[eternalprophet]

Thanks a crapload man!

[eternalprophet]

It worked, thank you guys very much. When I first read the post only one person had replied, not sure why I did not see the other two.

Thank you for all your suggestions. I am running the newest version of PHP so I will try to use the new superglobal variables (I believe they are turned on, if not, I can turn them on...are there any downsides to having them on though?)

It works good so far, thank you for all the help.

How could I print out this array though?

I tried:

for (i=0;i<7;i++){
echo $states;
}

That is the syntax I found online for the for statement...I could not find anything on printing out arrays (I remember seeing stuff before, but not lately)

[YappyDog]

Your code is pretty close to what you need to print the contents of the array out. The "i" is a variable, so it needs to be $i. I also added in a break after each print.

for ($i=0;$i<7;$i++){
echo $states[$i] . "<br>";
}