Validating Forms and DBase Additions

K3ith

I am creating a simple php/mysql script where you can enter football teams and their scores into a form and stores it to a database. So far I have it so you can do this and I'm printing the stored information on a page.

Questions I have...

Whats the best way to validate ALL form fields? Right now I am doing it separately with the empty function. The problem is it only echos the error for the first blank field it finds, even if you have multiple. Plus it still adds the information to the database with blank fields. How do I validate them all and stop it from adding the information if there are blank fields?

I'm also having trouble figuring a way to determine a winner. My original code used if/elseif/else to do the argument of ($team1 > $team2) and then it printed "The winner is...$variable" depending on the argument. I can't figure out how to do this now that I have the database connected.

etully

To check all the fields and alert the user of all the fields they left blank, create an array called $errors (or whatever you like). Everytime you discover that a field was blank (or contains info that isn't right), you push another error onto the $errors array like this:

<?php

$errors = array();

// x should not be blank
$x = $_REQUEST['x'];
if (!$x or $x=="") { $errors[] = "You left the X field blank"; }

// y should not be blank
$y = $_REQUEST['y'];
if (!$y or $y=="") { $errors[] = "You left the Y field blank"; }

// zip_code must be exactly 5 numbers
$y = $_REQUEST['zip_code'];
if (!ereg("^[0-9]{5}$",$y)) { $errors[] = "Zip Code must be exactly 5 numbers"; }

?>

Now that you have an array that contains all the errors, you can use an if statement that either (A) displays the errors to the user if there are errors or (😎 inserts them into a database like this:


if (count($errors)==0) { // Woo Hoo!!!  There were no errors, insert into database

    //  Put your database insert statements here

}
else { // Darn!  There were errors.

      print "Sorry, there were some problems with the form. ";
      print "Press your back button and make these changes:<br>";
      foreach ($errors as $e) {
             print "$e<br>";
      }
}

Kudose will step in any moment now to tell me to use preg instead of ereg to validate the zip code. And he's right. I just don't remember the perl reg exp syntax variants off the top of my head so I'm leaving that as an exercise to the reader to improve my code. And yes, the empty() function is probably a better way to see if the field has no value. I'm a hack, what can I say.