$_POST and variables

Stinger51

I've decided to recode all my variables on my pages as PHP 4.3 now demands they be (unless you have register_globals = on) as :

$_POST['var_name']

I'm doing this in advance in case any server I am on has register_globals = off (as is now recommended).

The problem is, however, when doing things like a trim() on a variable, e.g. "FirstName" this will not obviously work :

$FirstName = trim(\"$_POST['FirstName']\");

Nor will :

$FirstName = trim($_POST['FirstName']);

The only way I can see around this issue is to do :

$FirstName = $_POST['FirstName'];
$FirstName = trim(\"$FirstName\");

This seems like a double operation on any variable that I want to manipulate, a lot of extra coding.

Anybody have a better idea?

Thanks in advance.

LordShryku

$FirstName = trim($_POST['FirstName']);

should work...

Stinger51

Well, that's what I thought too. But I get this error :

Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_ENCAPSED_AND_WHITESPACE, expecting T_STRING or T_VARIABLE or T_NUM_STRING in c:\program files\apache . . .

Apparently functions like trim() want a string literal ? Dunno.

MungoBBQ

I can't try it out right now, but an (ugly) workaround could be:

$FirstName = trim("{$_POST['FirstName']}");

superwormy

This works just fine: $FirstName = trim($_POST['FirstName']);

Make sure you havn't made other errors and that the syntax error is, in fact, on that line of code...

MungoBBQ

$FirstName = trim($_POST['FirstName']);

It probably does work then, but you may need to check that $_POST['FirstName'] is set first - trim() may give you an error if you pass an empty variable.