passing form array variable to different pages

wyne1234

page 1 has a form and the data get put in an array
eg
<input name="rvardata[name]" type="text" id="rvardata[name]" size="40">
<input name="rvardata[email]" type="text" id="rvardata[email]" size="40">
.....

page 2 has form with hidden fields to pass data from page 1 on to page 3 along with new data.

problem
Can I pass the array variable collected from the form on page 1 to page 3 in one step?
I have <input type="hidden" name="rvardata" value="<?php echo "$rvardata" ?>">

This does not work. Do I have to have a hidden field for each element in the array??

Like:
<input type="hidden" name="rvardata[name]" value="<?php echo "$rvardata[name]" ?>">
<input type="hidden" name="rvardata[email]" value="<?php echo "$rvardata[email]" ?>">

UGH I have about 60 elements and this would be terrible.

Thanks for any advice.

swr

Sounds like a job for sessions.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.session.php

Short version:
Call [man]session_start/man at the very beginning of each page. Then you can store data in the $_SESSION[] array and it will be preserved across pages.

Be sure to read the manual though, especially the [man]session_start/man page and its comments.

wyne1234

Thanks for your reply. I use sessions on another page and they work like a charm. The problem with this set of pages is as follows

page 1 collects info
page 2 displays page one info and goes to the bank for processing
bank processor returns to my page 3

If credit card processed without errors I write the data collected from page 1 to a database and email the client.

I can pass variables to the bank and have them returned.

I guess my shortcomings are in that I thought you can refer to an array by the name. ie if I call the arrary $data[] and populate it, I thought that I could just pass the variable $data to other pages and then I could write to the database by pulling our the various elements of the arrary.

Any thoughts on this?

swr

[man]serialize[/man] and [man]unserialize[/man] might be what you want then. That will allow you to easily store complex data types (arrays, objects, arrays of objects, etc) as a single value, to be unpacked later.

I sometimes use serialize even with sessions, as putting objects into sessions doesn't always handle references properly, while serialize does.

wyne1234

When I use serialize the string is truncated on the next page I pass it to via post.
eg
$data = serialize($myarray);
echo" $data";

produces a:21:{s:5:"fname";s:5:"wayne";s:5:"lname";s:6:"arnold";}

No I put a hidden form field to pass $data to the next page.
On the next page if I echo $data I get the following:
a:21:{s:5:

It seems that the string is truncated at the first " . I have tried to use addslashes to see if that helps but it does not. I just get the output a:21:{s:5://
Seems that a slash is already added by default as you can see that there are now 2 slashes.

Thoughts?

swr

Try [man]htmlentities[/man] or [man]htmlspecialchars[/man] on the serialized data. I can't remember which one is appropriate to this case.

The problem is that the quote in the data is ending the value="string" string in your HTML. View source on the resulting HTML and you'll see what I mean. Addslashes won't fix it because backslashes don't have any special meaning in HTML.

wyne1234

Thanks, your suggestion worked.

To pass form data to a second, third page etc. I did the following:

page 1 - all form fields set to $array[name], $array[email], $array[phone],.....

So now all the data from the form is in one array.

page2 - to pass the array onto another page :
-serialize the array eg. $string=serialize($array)
-to remove quotes from string so that the hidden form field (....value = "$string") will work I added the htmlspecialchars($string) right after I serialized the array

page 3 - have to remove the escapes that php places in the string before you can unserialize to get the array back for eg. $string = stripslashes($string);

Then $array = unserialize($string);

Works like a charm and I don't have to make dozens of hidden form fields to maintain data.

Having the form data in an array Ican also use the following on page 2 to easily remove escapes for fields where the user includes an apostrophy which also saves many lines;

foreach($array as key_var =>value_var) {
$array[$key_var] = stripslashes($array[$key_var]);
}

Thanks for all your help!