Writing to HTML textbox?

tbanov

Hi,

I'm just writing my first test PHP site to help myself get some basics down. Now, on one of my pages, I have an HTML textbox and a submit button. The goal is to have this textbox populated from my database when the page loads, then the user can change the text however they want, hit submit, and the database is updated. The latter parts are working fine - I can submit some content and it will remove the old content, replacing it with the new. However, I can't seem to move data the other way. ie I can pull text from the textbox, but not write to it. Can I even do this with PHP at all, or do I maybe need to use Javascript? I tried searching but couldn't find anything.

Thanks.

NogDog

If you are talking about a HTML <textarea>, just output the data between the tags:

echo "<textarea name='example' cols='40' rows='10'>$textFromDB</textarea>\n";

If there is some other issue with how to actually get the text from the database, we may need to see some code or such.

tbanov

My apologies - I was not specific enough. I actually mean a "text" type form item, like this:

<form method="post">
				<input type="text" name="text">
				<input type="submit" value="Submit">
			</form>

Of course I can retrieve whatever text is in there with $forms["text"], but I can't assign some value to $forms["text"].

NogDog

Assign the value to the input tag's "value" attribute:

<input type="text" name="text" value="<?php echo $forms["text"]; ?>">

Ikul

I have a related question. How do I do the opposite? How do I retrieve the text from an <input type=text>? The only way I've seen is with $_POST, and that requires the form to be submitted trough a method=post, and that gives POSTDATA issues.

NogDog

What are the "POSTDATA issues"?

The only other option is to use method="get" in your form and access it via $_GET, but since I do not know to what "issues" you are referring, I have no idea if that makes any difference for you.