$_POST question

Stinger51

As I understand it, $_POST[0] should contain the value of the first post variable from a submitted form. So, one should be able to loop thru all the form values, text box values, etc., on any form that is submitted.

But having register_globals = 0 seems to kill this idea. Are there any work arounds? I certainly don't want to have to use the name value for each control, e.g. $var = $_POST['zipcode'] -- which is not looping at all. :glare:

nunomira

hi,

you can use a foreach() to loop through any array, and that includes $_POST.

For example:

foreach ($_POST as $val)
{
	echo $val;
}

devinemke

Originally posted by Stinger51
As I understand it, $POST[0] should contain the value of the first post variable from a submitted form.

no, not necessarily. the $POST array contains all of the POSTed data with the form field names as keys and the form field values as values. so the first form name may or may not be called "0".

you can access the POST data using an of PHP's array fucntions and contructs. for example:
[man]foreach[/man]
[man]extract[/man]
[man]sort[/man]
[man]count[/man]

Stinger51

Thanks, that did the trick.

What I'm trying to do is determine whether to update a DB table based upon the form data. For example, on form 1, the user can edit any data he/she wishes to, e.g. a phone number or zip code. On form 2 (which updates the table) it compares the original data to the new data it receives (via the $_POST array).

To preserve the original data to compare the new data to, as I am loading form 1, I also populate session variables which will be used on form 2 for the data comparision. If nothing has changed (meaning the user clicked the update button without actually changing anything) then the table is not updated. If the data has changed, I also time stamp a date field in the table to track the date of the change.

This may not, however, be the best way to do things in terms of preserving the original values. Nor can I loop thru $SESSION like I can $POST, since I am using other session vars on other forms. If you or anybody has a better method I am all ears.

Note: I have thought about using some javascript to hide the update button on form 1 until a field is actually changed. But I don't want the hassle of having to handle a user who has JS turned off.

devinemke

Originally posted by Stinger51
...Nor can I loop thru $SESSION like I can $POST, since I am using other session vars on other forms.

sure you can. simply stick the values from the db in a sub-array of the $SESSION array. for example:

$_SESSION['row'] = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);

then simply compare $POST and $SESSION['row'] for differences. remember to [man]stripslashes[/man] if necessary before comparing and then [man]addslashes[/man] before db update.

Stinger51

Trying to follow you there, but got lost. Here's how I fetch my data :

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
$Name= $row['PersonName'];
$Street = $row['StreetAddress'];
.
.
.
}

I then initialize session vars as :

$SESSION['original_PersonName'] = trim($Name);
$SESSION['original_StreetAddress'] = trim($Street);

Using $_SESSION['row'] would just keep writing to that same session variable with new data, would it not?

I also looked up mysql_fetch_assoc() in the MySQL library but didn't find any information on this function.

Thanks in advance.

devinemke

if you are querying on a unique field (primary key) and expect only one single row returned then you can simply do this:

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM table WHERE id = '$id'");
$_SESSION['row'] = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);

BTW: [man]mysql_fetch_assoc[/man] is a PHP function, not a mySQL function.

Stinger51

I now have my associative array as part of the Session array as :

$_SESSION['MyArray'] = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);

which contains all the associated values from the db query. But I need to change one of the array elements in MyArray (a date value I am comparing to something else). I want to change the date value from the standard MySQL yyyy-mm-dd to a mm-dd-yyyy format.

The actual associative array position where this is located in MyArray is :

key = "date"
val = "2003-11-12"

What would be the syntax for directly changing this value? I don't see anything in the library to do this, e.g. no compliment to array_search() with an array_set().

Thanks in advance.

devinemke

you have 2 options: the best is to do the formatting right at the query:

SELECT *, DATE_FORMAT(date, '%m-%d-%Y') as date_formatted FROM table

or you can do the formatting in PHP:

$_SESSION['date'] = date('m-d-y', strtotime($_SESSION['date']));

again, option #1 is better