Urgent Help

[Cyndi_Newbie]

hello all,

i'm very new to php.

i have a php page(user.php) wherin i have a form with quite a few variables.

Basically the user is asked to fill in the form and once he fills it, i take him to a thank you page and he can download a file by clicking at the specified url. Below are the variables which use textbox:

Name: textbox
<input type="text" name="name_var">

Organization: textbox
<input type="text" name="organization_var">

Address: textbox
<input type="text" name="address_var">

City: textbox
<input type="text" name="city_var">

State: textbox
<input type="text" name="state_var">

Zipcode: textbox
<input type="text" name="zipcode_var">

Phone: textbox
<input type="text" name="phone_var">

Email address: textbox
<input type="text" name="email_var">

I also have 2 drop-down menus with some values. For example, under the district category, i have many values

<select size="1" name="district_var">
<option>districtname1</option>
<option>districtname2</option>
<option>districtname3</option>
</select>

how can i validate the form and check that he has entered some valid input in each of the above variables in the form? Please help me out. I'll be grateful to you if you cud provide me code for the above.

another thing..

after the form has been filled properly, i take them to another page(download.php) which has the url for downloading a ppt file. Now the thing is: On the page the url is very clearly specified i.e it is standard something like:

http://www.something.com/sth.ppt

I don't want the user to know the exact location of the ppt file. A user who hasn't filled the form may still be able to access the powerpoint file. I want to hide the exact location of the file. How do i do this? Thanks a lot. I appreciate your help.

[Kudose]

if(!$var || !$var2 || !$var3 || !$etc){
echo "Error.  Please complete the enitre form.";
} else {
header("Location: download.php");
}

You could always browse around with the header() function and make the download automatically happen, instead of the header redirect, preventing the user from knowing where it came from.

[yelvington]

The answer to your first question is simple but tedious: You have to check every supplied value. What you consider to be "valid" is up to you. (Example: Use a regular expression to check the form of an email address).

If anything is misformatted or missing, you should regenerate the form WITH the user's supplied data and flag the bad input.

On your second question, to "hide" the URL of a file, simply consider it to be binary data. Output the proper headers directly from PHP, then output the data with readfile(). The extensive notes on the manual page for header() include examples of how to set the content-disposition and content-type values.