if $var increments

themanwhowas

ive spent 3 hours trying to get this crap to work now and im so stressed out

<?PHP
if(empty($var3))
{
$var3 = 1;
}
$var2 = $_POST['comment'];

if($var3 == 1)
{echo $var2;
$var3++;
echo $var3;
}

elseif($var3 > 1)
{echo 'only 1 comment each i\'m afraid';
}

else
{echo 'No comments yet!';
}

?>

the idea is that the first time someone see's the page it echos 'no comments yet', after filling the form it is echo'd in the page, the second, third, fourth time etc that they try to fill in the form it will not let them.
i know this will be lost after the page is reloaded, thats not my problem.
my problem is that to tell if the user has posted a comment x times, i am using the $var3 conditionals.
i have $var3++ if the comment is posted, which should make the elseif run the second time around. but it doesnt.
i dont know why. i have added a $var3 echo after the $var3++ to see what happens and it doesnt increment so i know its something here. i gues that its being set to 1 everytime before being incremented, thus running the if conditional but i cant qork out why.

please help me. im at my wits end

Jasp182

It sounds like you're trying to use the same variable between page requests, but once a page finishes executing, variables are all released from memory.

You can use the session for this. The simplest way is to call session_start() at the top of your page, read the value from the session into a local variable, and then at the bottom of the page (or wherever you have the final value for this variable) put the current value of the variable back into session.

I also would suggest using more descriptive variable names. If this page gets bigger and bigger, variables named var1, var2, var3 are going to make less and less sense.

Are you putting these comments into a database somewhere? There might even be better ways of checking if a user is allowed to post a comment than just checking the number of times they've tried in the current session.

themanwhowas

thanks. i was under the impression that the variables remain after reloading via a form submission but are lost after the page is refreshed by other means. it makes sense that forms would not be a special case. thanks for the help.

oh, $var1 $var2 etc were just for my example