[Resolved] Values dissapearing using expload

Dr_Flink

I have this form where the user fills in the end result of a football match. After u press the next-button, som boxes will appear where u can write down the ones that scoored. The problem is that only the last value is written to the database. What am I doing wrong???

This is a part of the script:

<form name="Scoorers" method="post" action="">
    <input name="endresult" type="text" id="endresult" value="<? if (isset($_POST['endresult'])) print $_POST['endresult']; else { print '0-0'; } ?>" size="3" maxlength="5">
    <input name="save" type="submit" id="save" value="Next..."><br>

<? 
//Checks how many goals is made in the game and makes boxes compared to the amount of goals
if (isset($_POST['save'])) {

	$save = explode("-", $_POST['endresult']);

	if ($save[0] != 0){
		print '<b>Hometeam scoorers:</b><br>';
			$a = 0;
			while ($a < $save[0]) {
				$a++;
				print $a . ':' . ' ' . '<input type="text" name="hscoorer">' . '<br>';
			}
	}
	if ($save[1] != 0){
		print '<b>Awayteam scoorers:</b><br>';
			$b = 0;
			while ($b < $save[1]) {
				$b++;
				print $b . ':' . ' ' . '<input type="text" name="ascoorer">' . '<br>';
			}
	}
}
?>
  <input name="sendref" type="submit" id="amatch" value="Spara"> 
</form><br>
<?
if (isset($_POST['hscoorer']))
	print $_POST['hscoorer'];
?>

drew010

by the looks of things, when you create your loop, you are printing out the same form field
<input type="text" name="hscoorer">
multiple times.

by having numerous fields with the same name, each subsequent field overwrites the previous one, leaving you with only the data from the last textbox. To prevent this, you can either enumerate the names of the input boxes with a number on the end, or the better way to do it is use an array.

To make an array out of the fields, simply put a [] on the end of the fieldname. doing this would look like
<input type="text" name="hscoorer[]">

now when the form is posted, $_POST['hscoorer'] is an array of all the textboxes. so you can do something like this:

foreach ($_POST['scoorer'] as $score) {
  echo $score . "<br />\n";
}

hope this helps out.

Dr_Flink

Yes, it worked just the way I was hoping for. But now I'm wondering how I will get these array values into my sql-db. Is it possible to store them in new variables? And if so, how am I going to do that?

Thank u for your help! 🙂

drew010

you have a few options as far as storing the values. you can concatenate them into one string using some unique delimiter so you can explode the string later, or you can [man]serialize[/man] the array before storing it in the db and then pull the array out later in its original form. serialization is probably the cleanest way to handle it as far as writing extra code goes. of course if you serialize it you cant directly query the database for a specific record on a user without pulling the whole thing out.

Dr_Flink

aaah, ok thank u. I will read a little bit more about this with arrays and serializations.

Thanks for all your help!