newbie requesting help with php+forms

[louisianne]

Hello! I'm a newbie to php, so please be gentle 🙂)

I've got a bit of a problem that I don't know how to work my way out of and am requesting help ... here's the scenario:

I am building a page that has two "forms" on it, one being a search form (a search button + a user input box) and the other being a user data input form.

The underlying data and MySQL database are an authors maintenance list. Fields are "authorname," "email," "website," and "comments." What I am trying to do is this:

Upon opening the page, the user first does a search on the author.

If there is a hit (ie, author is already in the database), the user data input form is populated with the info in the database. If not in database, a "Author not found" message appears, the user input for remains "empty," and the user can input the new author info.

Can anyone give me some clues and guidance as to how to pull this off?

[gandotratushar]

in the start of the page write the query for the search. to get the result try mysql_fetch_array() and then use $row['author'] to get the individual author. put this in a while loop........now to fill the text box onload try
<input type="text" value="<?php echo $row['author']?>">

Try this.this might help u.
For the exact syntax of the commands use php.net