Trouble with passing info from form input to PHP file

[spivey]

I have written two php documents largely copying data from an article.

The form-input document (getfiles.php) contains the following form statements, with the related "input" statements for the two pieces of data that aren't carrying over to grabfile.php, and the code for the "submit" operation (I'm just showing snippets for the sake of readers' sanity):

<form enctype="multipart/form-data" name="frmUploadFile" action="grabfile.php" method="post">

<input type="text" name="strDesc" size="20" maxlength="50"></td>

<input type="file" name="fileUpload" size="20"></font></td>

<input type="submit" value="Upload this file" name="cmdSubmit"></font></td>

The following code is the top prt of the grabfile.php code:

<?php

global $strDesc;

global $fileUpload;

global $fileUpload_name;

global $fileUpload_size;

global $fileUpload_type;


if(empty($strDesc) || $fileUpload == "none")

die("You must enter both a description and file");

The global $strDesc and global $fileUpload should be filled by the form input, correct? I have made sure that those names are exact as in the "getfiles.php" document, where they do not have $ in front of them.

After this code would come the login for the database, but I don't even get that far.

Any ideas, anyone?

Thanks in advance

spivey

[devinemke]

a very simple example:

<form action="" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
description: <input type="text" name="description"><br>
file: <input type="file" name="file"><br>
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Upload this file">
<br>
<br>

<?php
if (isset($_POST['submit']))
{
	if ($_POST['description'] == '' || $_FILES['file']['error'] == 4)
	{
		echo 'You must enter both a description and file';
	}
	else
	{
		echo 'you entered:<br><br>description: ' . $_POST['description'] . '<br>file: ' . $_FILES['file']['name']; 
	}	
}
?>

[spivey]

devinemke
I have tinkered with your suggested code, and I'm not getting any better results. :o

I guess before I start trying to rework the code, I need to understand why the existing code isn't working.

I need to know:
if I use "form action="grabfile.php" in the form document, sending two inputs with the following names:

strDesc (for the description of the file)
fileUpload (for the file, itself)

Why don't those values get carried over to grabfiles.php, where they are supposed to be given the assigned global variable names:

$strDesc
$fileUpload

To "grabfiles.php" I have added

echo $HTTP_POST_VARS["strDesc"];
echo $HTTP_POST_VARS["fileUpload"];

and I get:

Notice: Undefined variable: HTTP_POST_VARS in C:\...\grabfile.php on line 16

Notice: Undefined variable: HTTP_POST_VARS in C:\...\grabfile.php on line 19

So, I'm not even sure which file (getfiles.php--the form document, or grabfiles.php--the processing document) is the problem.

Thanks.

spivey

btw, I took this code from the following article: http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/MySQL/Blobbing-Data-With-PHP-and-MySQL/

[dagon]

you need to be looking in $POST and $FILES, not $HTTP_POST_VARS

[spivey]

Dagon, I changed the "HTTP_POST_VARS" to "$POST" and "$FILES". They echoed nothing, so that probably indicated those variables are not carrying data over from the original form document.

It ran through the entire script, even echoing the "File Upload" which should indicate success. But, I checked the database and no files were entered.

So, I put those two echo statements at the very top of the page:

<?php

echo $_POST['strDesc'];

echo $_FILES['fileUpload'];

global $strDesc;

global $fileUpload;

global $fileUpload_name;

global $fileUpload_size;

global $fileUpload_type;

if(!(strlen($strDesc) && $fileUpload == "none"))

die("You must enter both a description and file");

It echos the following:

wee fileArrayYou must enter both a description and file

I had entered the brief description "wee file" and had chosen, via a "browse", a small .txt file. So, it echoed the "wee file" that I had entered, and I guess the text file echoes as an array. But, it is clear that this information is not getting assigned to the

global $strDesc;

global $fileUpload;

variables like it should.

What's the deal with these globals, and why aren't they picking up the data from the form file?

Thanks, all

Spivey

[dagon]

as they are arrays you want to use print_r

print_r($POST);
print_r($FILES);

[bradgrafelman]

1. The behavior you're expecting to work is register_globals, which is a security exploit and was deprecated long ago.

2. I don't think you know what [man]global[/man] really does...

3. As dagon suggests, doing a [man]print_r/man to show the contents of an array is the easiest way to debug it and see what values it holds.

[spivey]

Thanks, both.

the print_r statements yielded this error message:

Array ( [strDesc] => html file [cmdSubmit] => Upload this file ) Array ( [fileUpload] => Array ( [name] => bookpage.html [type] => text/html [tmp_name] => C:\WINNT\TEMP\php3.tmp [error] => 0 [size] => 1493 ) ) You must enter both a description and file

I just checked the article that I took most of this code from, and it is from 2002, hence my use of deprecated "global". Oops.

Spivey

[bradgrafelman]

Looks like the file is being uploaded properly and everything, so just use $POST and $FILES and it should work fine.