Problem with FORMs

nophp

I have been having problems passing variables using html forms. To confirm this problem, I wrote a small bit of code which is shown below. The file name is test01.php.

I am running PHP 4.2.2 on Red Hat Linux 9 with Apache 2.0.

Here's the code and I would appreciate any help.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

<html>
<head>
<title>Untitled</title>
</head>

<body>

if ($submit)
{
// Tried priniting $UserName directly
echo "Hello, $UserName"

            // Tried prinitng $UserName with the $_POST[] variable
            $UserName = $_POST['UserName'];
echo "Hello, $UserName";

}
else
{
echo '

Enter Your Name
<input type="text" name="UserName"></input><br>

</form>

';
}

</body>
</html>

langals

You also need to use $_POST to check if the submit button has been clicked:

if ($_POST['submit'])
{

//etc

langals

aaron_karp

Problem 1: You have no semicolon after echo "Hello, $UserName"

Problem 2: You never open your PHP tag with <?PHP

Problem 3: Have you tried if ($_POST['submit']) ?

And lastly, there's an obnoxious little bug with single-field forms that get get to be a real pain. What happens is if you have a form with only a signle text field and a submit button, if you finish filling out the text field and press Enter, the form won't be submitted. You have to manually click the submit button.

Hope this helps. If not, be more specific about your problem in your reply.

-Aaron

nophp

Thanks you langals and aaron_karp for your responses.

langals your suggestion worked. However, I now have another question.

The actual code that I have (not the code that I pasted in my earlier message) consists of about 60 different files quite a few of which use FORMs. This code was written prior to PHP 4.2.2 and used to run on PHP 4 (I do not know the exact version although I do know that it was earlier then PHP 4.2.2). The code does now use the $_POST variables but uses the variables directly.

i.e., it uses: if ($submit) instead of if ($_POST['submit']) and it used to run without a problem.

So, are the $_POST[] variables new in PHP 4.2.2. Also, since the code I have does not use this variable, is there any way for me to run that code without changing it completely?

aaron_karo my apologies for copying and pasting code that had obviuos errors. The actual code in my editor (Macromedia Homesite) does not contain the errors you pointed out.

aaron_karp

That's alright about the errors, I just wanted to point them out to be sure. And, for the record, I had to solution also, he just posted his a minute before I did, while I was still typing 🙂

But on to your current problem, you have a few options:

1) I use macromedia dreamweaver, which lets me search all of the files in a site and replace any source code. I.e. you could search for all instances of if ($submit) and replace them with if ($_POST['submit']). The danger in doing this is that you never really know what you might screw up, although it's probably not too dangerous in this case.

2) Now, I'm a windows guy, and I run IIS, not Apache nor Linux. But, on Windows I have a neat little php.ini configuration file and I'm sure it's got a counterpart on linux. If you open up that file and search for "register_globals" you will find that it is set to OFF. If you change this to ON then your scripts will work. However, it's always recommended that you write your scripts to allow globals to be set to Off (for security reasons beyond my understanding).

Hope this helps.

nophp

Hi aaron_karp,

I think you are right about the "register_globals". In my cases if I run phpinfo(), it does show "register_globals" as set to "off".

Since this is my home linux installation that I am using mainly for learning and experimenting, I don't mind setting register_globals to "on". Except, I don' t know how to do it in Linux. If anybody can help me with this I would certainly appreciate it.

aaron_karp

To be honest, though, in the long run you're going to want to write all of your scripts to conform to register_globals = Off. Perhaps for this one program of yours you can set them to on, but I'd recommend writing any future programs the recommended way.