dumbest question ever

chrisleon

I have some php scripts that have an:

if($submit){
}

else{
form
table
input
etc....
}

If I push the submit button, all works well. If I type into the input box and hit enter, the form just comes right back. I am assuming it is because $submit is not set. What techniques can I use to make this work, other than separating the results from the search into different files?

chrisleon

Nevermind, I am an idiot.

I inserted a:

in between the form tags and now hitting enter works within side the same script.

Sorry for even posting this garbage.

bradgrafelman

You might want to take note of a few things:

That HTML is invalid - make sure you're validating your HTML. 😉
If code such as if($submit) works, and you never explicitly define $submit in your PHP code, then you should disable the register_globals directive and start using the superglobal arrays (such as $_POST in this case). More information on these arrays can be found on this manual page: [man]variables.predefined[/man]. The reason for this is that register_globals was long ago deprecated in light of security exploits (in fact, it's no longer available in PHP6 and has been disabled by default in PHP installations for quite some time).
Don't forget to mark this thread resolved!

greenie2600

Your original form was behaving properly. Submit buttons are only successful if they are actually clicked (see the second bullet point here). Pressing enter to submit a form doesn't activate any specific submit button (a form can have more than one), so that control wasn't successful.

Actually, the spec says "if a form contains more than one submit button, only the activated submit button is successful" - which seems to suggest that if a form contains exactly one submit button, it should be successful even if the form is submitted by some other means. I seem to recall that the behavior you've described is a quirk of Internet Explorer 6.

In any case, I generally do this, sidestepping the problem entirely:

if ( $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] === 'POST' ) {
    // ...do stuff...
}

Of course, that'll only work if your form uses the POST method. If you need to use the GET method for some reason (e.g., to make a search results page bookmarkable), your approach with the hidden form field is probably fine.

Brad's right - register_globals is evil. 🙂