[Resolved] Basic IF statements not behaving

[Davidc316]

I've been turning a blind eye to this problem for ages, but I've finally reached a point where it's cracking me up.

Basically, I'm increasingly being plagued with instances where the most fundamental PHP statements are absolutely NOT behaving as they should.

To give a concrete example...

Let's say I've got a form that I want people to fill in. And, let's say that the form has range of fields such as Name, Email address, Description and so on. Now, if all of the values in the form have been filled in then COOL- the script can enter the info into a database and all is well.

But, let's imagine that a person accidentally forgets to fill out the field called "Full Description" that's on the form. Well, in that case the script should simply realise that the Full Description ($fulldesc) is empty and display an error message.

But it's just not working for me! 🙁

I shall end this thread with a snippet of my code. To paint the picture, the code I'm showing is on the page that has received the information from the form. So, imagine that somebody has just filled out an HTML form with fields call "item_nam", "item_pirc" and so on. The code below is on the page that has received these raw variables...

$itemname=ucfirst(addslashes(strip_tags(trim($_POST[item_nam]))));
$itemprice=$_POST[item_pric];
$itemprice = ereg_replace("[^.[:digit:]]", "", $itemprice);
$itemimage="defaultpic.gif";
$shortdesc=ucfirst(addslashes(strip_tags(trim($_POST[shortdesc]))));
$smallpic="defaultsmallpic.gif";
$category=addslashes($_SESSION[cate]);
$shipping=$_POST[postandp];
$shipping = ereg_replace("[^.[:digit:]]", "", $shipping);
$fulldesc=ucfirst(addslashes(strip_tags(trim($_POST[fulldesc]))));
$_SESSION[itemname]=$itemname;

if ($itemname && $itemprice && $itemimage && $shortdesc && $smallpic && $category && $shipping && $fulldesc !=="") {
//enter the stuff into the MySQL table and move on
}

The problem is... EVEN IF no full description ($fulldesc) has been filled in, the script goes ahead and enters data into the table.

Any help would be mega appreciated.

[tuf-web_co_uk]

try using this at the end

$fulldesc && $fulldesc != "")

it seems you were entering 2 equal signs when only one is necessary (and the $fulldesc is there just to make sure its been set)

[Davidc316]

You nailed it in one!!!!

I love it when the answer is simple!

THANK YOU!!

(that one's been making my life hell for about 3 months. Can you believe it??????)

[drawmack]

the problem is that's not how you write an if statement. If statement of boolean algebre, that means that every condition within the if statement must evaluate to true or false so try this instead.

<?
$field_names = array('itemname','itemprice','itemimage','shortdesc','smallpic','category','shipping','fulldesc');
$pass = TRUE;
foreach($field_names as $cur_field) {
    if($$cur_field == "") {$pass = FALSE;}
} //end foreach

if(!$pass) {
    //code for failure in here
} else {
    //code for success in here
}
?>

[Weedpacket]

Look, too, up the uses of [man]isset[/man] and [man]empty[/man], which are used to see if variables are set or empty. Also, the keys of associative arrays are supposed to be strings, not bare words; e.g., $POST['item_pric'] not $POST[item_pric] (which, if your error reporting was turned high enough, would result in an error message).