Simple POST from <form> problem

Opimus

Following the PHP tutorial I got to a frustrating it-should-be-simple:rolleyes: problem with echoing the input text from simple HTML form with simple PHP script.

<html>
<head>
<title>Search</title>
</head>
<body>
<h2>Enter</h2>
<br />
<form action="handle_form.php" method="POST" />
Please enter the name:
<br />
<input name="name" type=text>
<br />
<input type=submit value="search">
</form>
</body>
</html>

<?
echo $name;
?>

I've already made search on forum, found Simple POST no workie thread where NogDog suggest that it has to do something with global variables (as far as I know this considers whether variables are in/outside a function?).

Well, anyway even following NogDog's advice:

echo $_POST['carcol '];/*'name'in my case*/

didn't help as first I had to put quotation marks around the code because echo expected a string and with quotation marks I got an syntax error.

The "closest" I got was with this code

<?
$search = "$_POST('name')";
echo $search;
?>

which returned Array('name'). That was at least something as with echo $name; I only got blank page.

So, what must be done to simply echo what was entered into text form in the HTML page😕

igorlopez

What happened when you used

echo $_POST['name'];

What NogDog referred to is that you should not assume register_globals is turned on which used to be a way of communicating form variables to the script. In normal installations now days is that register_globals is turned off and this means you must use the super globals variables to access the form data.

NogDog

You should be able to simply do:

<?php
echo $_POST['name'];

If you want to use an associative array element which has a quoted array index within a double-quoted string, then you need to use "complex notation" using curly braces around the array varialbe:

<?php
echo "The name is: {$_POST['name']}";

PS: A good habit to get into is to always use "<?php" tags rather than the short version of "<?", as the latter may not be enabled on all hosts, and may go away completely in some future major release of PHP. (They conflict with the XML declaration tag of "<?xml . . . ?>".)

Opimus

Thank you both guys!!

The code

echo $_POST['name'];

seems to be working?!🙂 Don't know where the nuisance came from.

I'll remember the <?php advice. And the complex notation works flawless also!

But if I run the HTML by double-clicking on the file Firefox loads it from file:///C:/wamp/www/Examples/search.html and it obviously won't run as it should. Is there a way to "force" to run from localhost?

By the way, why doesn't this code

<?
echo $name;
?>

work (even with globals turned on)? Is it obsolete?

halojoy

it should work with register_globals on
but maybe is short_open_tag off

but please, it dont use short_open_tag!!!! or register_globals on
it is NOT, NOT recommended

in your php.ini should be:

register_globals OFF
short_open_tag OFF

magic_quotes_gpc OFF

use long php tag <?php

and so we code like this:

<?php

// entered name
$ename = trim( $_POST['name'] );

echo 'you entered: <b>' . $ename . '<b>';

exit( 'the end' );

?>