[Resolved] Retrieving HTML attributes via PHP?

RedNaxela

I have an HTML form with a dropdown box (select list) of products. Each of these has a long name as well as a shorter abbreviation, so typical entries look something like this:

<option value="Internet Explorer 6.0" id="IE6">Internet Explorer 6.0</option>
<option value="Netscape 7.1" id="NS71">Netscape 7.1</option>

The idea is that I want to be able to retrieve both the "value" and the "id" attributes of the user's selection, and use both of these in my PHP code.

I would have thought that I can use syntax such as

$HTTP_POST_VARS['Product']->id

to retrieve the contents of the id attribute, but that doesn't seem to work correctly.

So is there a way to retrieve such attributes via PHP? Or can someone suggest a better method for accomplishing this?

luxluxlux

I'm afraid that the way you want to do it isn't going to work. You can only retrieve the one selected value for a form element. However, you could work around it by associating the value with the id in a hidden input field, or you could store the values in a more easily accessible format (ie. a database table, or an INI file using the parse_ini_file() function -- very handy) and then simply select them in PHP again on the form handler.

The first way you might do something like this:

<select name="list">
  <option value="one">one</option>
  <option value="two">two</option>
</select>
<input type="hidden" name="one" value="foo" />
<input type="hidden" name="two" value="bar" />

Then you could simply associate the value, stored in $POST['list'], with the id, stored in $POST[$_POST['list']].

The second way, you could store them in a separate file then dynamically generate the select box, like this:

; id = value
foo = one
bar = two

<?php

$list = parse_ini_file ('list.ini');

foreach ($list as $id => $value) {
   // display select box or handle form submission
}

?>

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Lux

devinemke

or something like this:

<select name="browser">
<option value="Internet Explorer 6.0|IE6">Internet Explorer 6.0</option> 
<option value="Netscape 7.1|NS71">Netscape 7.1</option>
</select>

then on the form processor:

$explode = explode('|', $_POST['browser']);
$long_name = $explode[0];
$short_name = $explode[1];