alternative to die?

pixelsoul

I have this form I created that works pretty well. I have it do some error checking like for missing form fiels, email headers, html in the form, etc. It works great except for when one of those errors happens I use "die" to kill the form and then a function to show the form again. When this happens of course it doesn't process the rest of the page like the footer or any other content below the form. I was wonder if anyone had any alternative methods or if there was a way that I could make this work better with out splitting up the code for the form into different pieces. Just include the footer in the code after the form fails?

Thanks.

future448

You wouldn't normally use die(); in this situation because its not actually an error with your script but a user input error.

Why not use if / ifelse statements

Example:

<?php
 if($_POST['required_field'] == '')  {  //check a field is filled in

   $error = '<p>' . $_POST['required_field'] . ' is required.</p>';
  }

 elseif(!strstr($_POST['email'], '@')) { // make sure email field contains an @ sign

  $error = '<p>' . $_POST['email'] . ' is not a valid email address.</p>';
  }

  if(!isset($error))  {  // if no error has been found

   // process your form

}

  else  {  // error was found

   echo $error; // display the error 

   // display your form again

   }  

?>

pixelsoul

It is funny how easy the solution is to that and I just couldn't get my brain to figure that out. I really must be a lazy brain today 🙂

Thanks a lot future448

laserlight

future448 has the right idea, but remember to use [man]isset[/man] or [man]empty[/man] to check that an incoming variable like $POST['required_field'] exists before using it even for a comparison like $POST['required_field'] == '' (which you would no longer need if you use empty).

pixelsoul

I think I have done right according to what you have said. I am not completely sure but I didn't want to post my whole code on here for everyone to see hehe. When I first started using php for forms to send mail a lot of my forms on customer sites were hijacked and I was so new to php I couldn't understand how. Now that I understand and have put code in to help to keep that from happening I get paranoid that they will figure out a work around lol.

Thanks for the info though. I altered my script and it is working like a charm 🙂

MarkR

die() is not useful in PHP - it is not the main error flagging method (unlike in Perl).

Don't use die(), ever.

Instead, if an unexpected condition is detected, throw an exception, which can be handled either by a "try" block in a calling function, or by your global exception handler otherwise.

Neither die nor exceptions should be used to check for non-error conditions, such as validation failure - that is a normal condition and should be treated accordingly. I normally append to a global array $errors[] so that the errors can be nicely formatted and listed individually, then check in the final step of processing if any errors have occured and only actually process the form if none have. After processing I typically redirect to another page (but not always). Otherwise, I show the form with or without error messages and parts prefilled as per the user.

Mark