spaces in form field names converted to underscores?

sneakyimp

I have a form that has spaces in the input field names:

		<td align="left" valign="top"><textarea  name="Description of Services" id="Description of Services" tabindex="23"><?=htmlspecialchars($formData['Description of Services']) ?></textarea></td>

The reason for this is because the db designer (moron that s/he is) has field names with spaces in them and it was convenient for me to leave them in.

The problem I'm having is that the $POST data i get in php replaces all the spaces in those field names with underscores meaning that instead of $POST['Description of Services'] having the value, its $_POST['Description_of_Services'] instead. Is that part of the HTTP spec? Is it something PHP does? Is there any way to prevent it?

I've noticed that both IE and Firefox behave the same way so I'm wondering if it's PHP spec of http spec or something.

Kudose

http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=40000

http://us3.php.net/variables

Basically, you are not allowed to use spaces in variable names. PHP does this, not HTTP.

dagon

id tokens cant have spaces according to the specs, so nice old php fixes them for you

sneakyimp

Harrumph. I'm thinking it's an array key, not a var. Unless of course I were using register_globals (which i don't). Oh well. Thanks for the info guys.

NogDog

As far as I can see from the HTML spec., a name attribute accepts a CDATA type as its value, which does allow spaces. (This is not to be confused with a "name token", which has nothing to do with "name attributes." :rolleyes: )

As alluded to above, I suspect the whole underscore thing in PHP came about because of the much-loved register_globals functionality. But then, a simple str_replace() gives you an easy work-around to convert in either direction, so no biggy, right? 🙂

dagon

ignore me im spastic

Weedpacket

dagon wrote:
ignore me im spastic

Still a valid observation: the id attribute there still shouldn't have spaces in its value. "Description-of-Services" would be valid.