Forms and textarea and PHP

[Cynthia_Blue]

I am putting together a PHP page that allows a user to fill in certain information in a form and hit the submit button and it saves it to the database. I have all of it on one page (man PHP is fun).

If the user hits submit but a couple of the fields are empty (using the strlen() function), it goes into an else that shows the form again. I wanted to make sure the priorly entered values still showed up, so am rebuilding the form in HTML with the value= tag, using the PHP variables to populate those fields that were already submitted. Works like a dream. 🙂

Except for the textarea form fields. I have the dropdown menu working well, and the text fields working well. However, it seems for some reason it doesn't want to put the value='$variable' back into the textarea form field.

Are these handled differently? Anyone know why this could be?
Thanks.

[paulsbooker]

for the textarea tag it goes something like

<textarea><$variable></textarea>

also i would consider the merits of checking your form entries client side with javascipt
which will involve no form submission

paul

[batman]

Yes, use this:

<textarea name="" id=""><? echo "$var"; ?></textarea>

-Blake

[Cynthia_Blue]

Aaahh. very cool thanks, fixed my problem. 🙂

I considered the JavaScript validation option but since I'm learning PHP I'd like to do it the PHP way. It seems to be working quite well this way too. 🙂

Thanks!